A massive storm tore its way across the Eastern Townships on Thursday night and Friday, first drenching the region with enough rain to spur flash flooding, then following that with high winds that toppled trees and took out power lines. In some parts of the Townships as much as 100mm of rain is reported to have fallen in a matter of hours, followed by winds in the area of 100km/h.
As of this writing there were still almost 34,000 households across the Monteregie and Estrie regions that were still without power, according to Hydro Quebec, making up nearly 30 per cent of all outages across the province. At its peak, the storm left nearly 1 million households across the province in the dark, making this the most severe mass-outage to hit the province since the 1998 Ice Storm, although teams from Hydro Quebec were hard at work throughout the weekend patching broken lines.
In Sherbrooke the water rose fast from Thursday night to Friday. The Saint-Francis River rose nearly fifteen feet over the course of the day, eventually peaking at just under 25 feet around 4:30 p.m.
The first floor of the Champlain College Building sustained significant water damage during the flash flood on Friday and will be closed for the foreseeable future. No administrative services will be available at the College on Monday, Nov 4 or Tuesday, Nov 5, but classes are scheduled to proceed as usual on Monday. See full story in the Monday, Nov. 4 edition of The Record.
