He says about 1,500 people, including Hydro-Québec employees and contractors, are on the job.

Labbé said crews are focusing on those areas where the power has been out the longest. Listen on CJAD 800 Radio: Hydro-Quebec provides power outage updateĪpart from Montreal, other areas dealing with outages include the greater Gatineau area and Pontiac region in western Quebec and Laval, north of Montreal.Hydro-Québec said Tuesday it has restored power to 99 per cent of the 1.1 million customers who lost electricity after freezing rain split tree trunks and sent branches crashing onto power lines last Wednesday. 'The damage that we are confronted with in the remaining outages is often major, and we sometimes have to use two to three teams to restore an outage that will take hours to repair but that will only bring back five to 10 customers at a time.' 'There's a complexity to all this, so that it's hard to say exactly how long some of these people who are still without power may end up having to wait,' Labbé said. The total number of incidents causing outages dropped from 500 earlier Tuesday to less than 300 by the afternoon. Much of the damage is in private backyards, and sometimes the extent of the damage isn't always apparent even after the repair, which is why the numbers are in flux. The common issue is that power lines have been damaged by mature trees, and branches need to be cleared before crews can conduct repairs, he said. Hydro-Québec spokesman Francis Labbé said the remaining work is particularly complex. SEE THE MAP: Hydro-Quebec power outages.About half of those still in the dark were in Montreal. On Tuesday morning, about 16,000 customers were off the grid, and by early afternoon the number had dropped below 12,000, though there were some fluctuations. Quebec's power utility said Tuesday it was working to fix the most complicated damage after last week's devastating ice storm but couldn't put a timetable on when everyone would have power back.

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