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‘Battle call’ for police: Weather havoc |
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Wacky weather in the region hit the Townships Tuesday afternoon, forcing citizens to take cover and leading to electrical outages across the region.
The City of Sherbrooke called its emergency plan into action after a short, but damaging storm hit the city around 3:40, with gusts of winds hitting up to 96 km/h.
All emergency response teams, including both the day and night shifts for police and firefighters, plus all Hydro-Sherbrooke and city road crews, were called into action to deal with crises throughout the city.
“The most problematic sector is Lennoxville, corner College and
Queen,” reported Gaetan Drouin, emergency measures coordinator for Sherbrooke.
“The traffic there is really difficult. The sector was closed from 3:45 until past 5 p.m.”
By an hour later things had calmed down considerably. Hydro-Sherbrooke’s main concern was a large pine tree leaning on hydro lines at the corner of Park and College in Lennoxville.
In the late afternoon, police spokesman Martin Carrier said the night shift had been called in early to deal with a flood of calls.
“At 5:15, we had 40 calls on hold just for fallen hydro lines. It’s a real battle call.”
Drouin said that following an Environment Canada warning of a severe thunderstorm, the city called in its partial crisis management team. When the storm hit a short time later, the emergency measures plan was put into action.
Around 5 p.m. as people were heading home from work, some 15,000 homes were out of power in Sherbrooke alone.
A spokesperson for Hydro-Québec said some 13,500 customers of the provincial utility in the Estrie region were out of power. That included 2,200 in Haut-St. François, 9,100 in Memphremagog, 1,300 in Sherbrooke that aren’t hooked up to Hydro-Sherbrooke, 1,400 in Val-St-François, and 170 in Coaticook.
Elsewhere in the Townships, some 13,500 Hydro customers in Brome-Missisquoi, 2,700 clients in Haute-Yamaska, and 2,800 in Drummondville were also in the dark in the late afternoon.
Hydro-Sherbrooke and Hydro-Québec were still out in force yesterday evening hooking up thousands of homes that were left powerless by fallen trees and branches.
Emergency teams were still on alert yesterday evening as Environment Canada warned that conditions in the Eastern Townships in the evening hours were still favorable to the further development of severe thunderstorms.
High winds from the storm created havoc across the Townships as fallen power lines, trees and large branches caused many roads to close. Among them Mitchell Street, in the Jacques-Cartier borough of Sherbrooke, where fallen trees and hydro lines blocked the road, as well as Chemin Giroux in the borough of Brompton.
Outside Sherbrooke, there were several roads blocked including Route 143 in Stanstead as well as the Chemin des Pères and Nicholas Austin in Austin.
In the Magog area, howling winds ripped the roof off the former Gaz Metro building on Centre Street, across from the Rona. The roof fell on a parked car with a woman inside. The woman wasn’t injured, but was treated for shock, said Captain Yves Denis of the Memphremagog Police Board.
Earlier in the day Alexander Galt Regional High School students were greeted with an added scare as they were gathered into the auditorium by the administration just before the storm roared in.
“We received some information that we’d be hit by a really bad storm,” said a school spokeswoman before she hung up quickly to deal with the crisis.
“We moved everyone safely and soundly into the auditorium to await clearance that it was safe to let them out of school. Once we got confirmation that there was no danger, we let the students out of the school just as their buses arrived.”
Environment Canada noted the passage of a strong thunderstorm line in the afternoon over southern Quebec “has produced several severe weather events. Hail, downpours, gusts of wind of more than 90 km/h, real hell.”
Due to the presence of a very warm and humid air mass over the province the Environment Canada weather forecast centre issued warnings of severe thunderstorms. Weather conditions were favourable to the development of storms that could produce large hailstones, high winds, heavy rain and intense lightning.
They recorded winds gusting to 96 km an hour in Sherbrooke, 90 km an hour in Frelighsburg and as high as 110 km an hour in Trois-Rivières.
Violent winds overturned seven trucks on the Champlain bridge in Montreal, injuring one person and causing transport officials to shut down the bridge in both directions just after 3 p.m.
By Joe Strizzi and Rita Legault
June 11, 2008 |
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Montreal Canadiens
