Birgit Klema has lived in her Beaconsfield home for 30 years.
She says she has experienced many power failures, but nothing quite like what she’s had to endure lately.
“I remember on Saint-Jean-Baptiste, we went 27 hours without electricity — which is really long.”
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Both she and some of her neighbours say that whenever there are strong winds, it seems their power goes out.
“We seem to be in a power grid where the rest of the neighbourhood is OK, but about 500 or 600 families seem to be the brunt of the problem,” said Beaconsfield resident Thomas Goldberg.
Both Goldberg and Klema are located in Beacon Hill, where other residents have also expressed concern.
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An online petition addressed to the mayor of Beaconsfield and Hydro-Quebec recently surfaced calling for improvements to Beacon Hill’s power grid.
The author writes that residents in the area have noticed an increase in power failures in recent years.
The petition asks that the municipality work with Hydro to conduct a review of the power distribution grid in Beacon Hill and to perform preventative tree trimming and maintenance.
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Beaconsfield Mayor Georges Bourelle says a combination of trees and weather conditions seems to be the problem.
“It’s unfortunate but I don’t think there’s very much we can do other than maintaining as well as possible the trees on our property and making sure Hydro is aware if it’s (a tree) within three metres of a power line,” said Bourelle.
A spokesperson with Hydro-Quebec says they discussed the situation with the city during a meeting last week.
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“The quality of electrical service in Beaconsfield doesn’t seem to be problematic, except that municipality and territory has very nice trees — and the place that we find a lot of trees — that unfortunately causes more outages,” said Jean-Philippe Rousseau, a spokesperson with Hydro-Quebec.
Hydro encourages anyone experiencing reoccurring power outages to contact their customer service department at (514) 385-7252 to file a complaint.
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