Good morning, Mr. Chair and members of the committee.
I want to thank you for your invitation. I am pleased to be able to contribute to your committees efforts by sharing with you the experiences that the MRC de Vaudreuil-Soulanges has had with increasing climate phenomena.
Mr. Chair, you are very familiar with our region—I have the honour of knowing you—but I would first like to describe our region for committee members to provide them with some context for the rest of my remarks.
The MRC de Vaudreuil-Soulanges comprises 23 municipalities over 855 km2 and was home to 166,076 inhabitants in 2022. The region features a constantly growing population, a road network consisting of Autoroute 30, Autoroute 20 and Autoroute 40, the Trans-Canada Highway, in addition to major national railway lines of the Canadian National and Canadian Pacific railways, not to mention the 5 pipelines that cross the the region and represent other risk factors. Vaudreuil-Soulanges is both metropolitan and rural in character, with agricultural land representing 76% of the MRC's area.
Our municipalities are feeling the consequences of climate change and increasingly face intense weather phenomena like the ice storm this past April. Everyone remembers the 1998 ice storm, and the one we had in April was the second biggest ice storm in Quebec's history.
The MRC de Vaudreuil-Soulanges was the first region to be hit by freezing rain. Nearly 97% of our population was without electricity for long periods of time ranging up to 6 days. The municipalities faced numerous challenges given the extraordinary circumstances and extent of the damage. We are never ready enough to face the vicissitudes of nature. We can always do better.
The first thing we try to do when this kind of situation occurs is obviously to establish communication with all local actors to ensure that everything is in place to meet emergency needs and quickly reassure the public.
The reality is that, even though we live in the communications era, we soon realized that we couldn't communicate among ourselves, since the telecommunications network was partly or completely down for many hours, indeed days in some areas. Consequently, we elected members, particularly mayors and MPs, couldn't even contact each other or local stakeholders. At the very least, the situation was much more complicated than usual.
Furthermore, since most of the population uses cell phones rather than land lines, we had no easy way to obtain cell numbers. To reach the public, stakeholders had to go door to door, instead of making quick telephone contact, to ensure, for example, that people in vulnerable situations were safe. That operation required much more time. All that was available was social media, for those who still had a connection. It wasn't sufficient for us to be able to contact the entire population.
Here are a few facts, to give you an idea of the crisis by the numbers. Nearly 30 to 35 mm of freezing rain fell in 13 hours. More than 40 mm fell in some places, according to Simon Legault, a meteorologist at Environment Canada. In the MRC de Vaudreuil-Soulanges, 64,765 of 75,429 Hydro-Quebec clients lost power. Essential services such as gas stations had to close their doors and were unable to meet the public's needs. Consequently, there were lineups several kilometers long over many hours at the only two or three service stations that were open in the MRC to supply gasoline for cars and generators.
In many cases, generators were used to pump water out of the basements of people's houses and other buildings and to ensure that heating systems worked for vulnerable individuals, in addition to providing opportunities to recharge cell phones so people could stay in touch with their families and friends. In other cases, failing that, municipalities and local stakeholders directed citizens to whatever local resources were available. In addition, the Lévis 911 emergency centre had never received so many calls in such a short period of time for our region. In 2022, 3,074 calls were made to 911 to report fires in Vaudreuil-Soulanges.
Some 2,177 calls were made to 911 Fire in the 6 days from April 4 to 9 of this year, a figure that represented 71% of the total number of 911 Fire calls received in all of 2022.
It is important to understand that a call to 911 isn't just one single call because it results in many more calls that are simultaneously made over the network to respond to it. You must also understand that calls concerning operational fire services are made by radio, whereas those regarding administrative services are made over the telecommunications system.
Since the telecommunications system wasn't operating during the ice storm, all administrative services were transferred to the radio network, which caused a significant increase in traffic on radio frequencies. Even the Sûreté du Québec—yes, the Sûreté du Québec—lost cell service. So you can understand how disastrous the impact on the communications of those essential services was.
To sum up, all our civil services, infrastructure and essential services were tested during the ice storm. These observations and this experience prove that we will need more government assistance to adapt our infrastructure to these increasingly frequent climate variations. We will definitely need to review the resilience of our telecommunications network to ensure that we can cope with these large-scale weather phenomena with which we will clearly be increasingly faced.
I will conclude by noting the resilience of the municipalities and by inviting the committee to consider various potential solutions to improve our telecommunications, electrical transmission and municipal infrastructure systems. I also encourage the various local stakeholders to take action by adopting specific measures, such as better vegetation control near electric power lines and a plan B for the telecommunications network.
Thank you for listening, and I hope your committee can help find and implement specific solutions as soon as possible given the issues at stake.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.