UXBRIDGE — A lightning bolt strike to an Uxbridge power station Monday night is responsible for a lengthy hydro outage to almost 2,000 Hydro One customers in the township, according to the utility company’s spokeswoman.

Daniele Gauvin said sometime during a severe thunderstorm, during which heavy rain and hail pelted the town, lightning struck a power distribution station “on the outskirts of Uxbridge” which caused a transformer failure. Some residents of Uxbridge reported being without power for 12 hours, beginning 8:30 p.m. Monday.

More than 2,000 customers, most of them within Uxbridge township borders, were affected, said Ms. Gauvin. But by 11:30 a.m. Tuesday, a mobile transformer was brought in and power was back online to all customers in Uxbridge, explained Ms. Gauvin.

Uxbridge Fire Chief Scott Richardson said firefighters were called to a transformer fire at about 9:30 p.m. Monday, noting Hydro One crews were already on scene. At 4:30 p.m. the same day, the fire department responded to reports of trees down on Lakeridge Road, between Hwy. 47 and Davis Drive, said the chief. “Apparently trees blocked one lane,” he said.

Region road crews sprang into action Monday night and remained in clean-up mode Tuesday morning.

Jim Gorrill of Durham Region works was clearing debris from the side of Lakeridge Road, just south of Davis Drive, Tuesday morning. He said he and his two workmates had started the job of tossing wood debris into a chipper at 7:30 a.m. but a crew had already been out overnight to cut up damaged branches.

“We have our work cut out for us today, that’s for sure,” said Mr. Gorrill. “We’ll likely be out here all day.” He said some of the cut wood is left at the roadside, and is free to the public.

“We’ve got the bulk of people back on,” spokeswoman Marylena Stea said just before 6 p.m. She said a few customers in remote areas remain without power following Monday’s storm, but it was hoped that would change by about 8:15 p.m.

“In Picton everyone is back on,” said Stea. Earlier that afternoon under 40 customers had yet to have their power restored.

Fifteen customers in Tweed were still waiting for their service to be restored, Stea said, adding more in the area between Brockville and Vankleek Hill were in the same situation.

Hydro One’s Daniele Gauvin said approximately 21,000 Hydro One customers were without electricity late Monday night after dozens of hydro poles were uprooted or snapped and power lines felled by lighting and strong winds ranging from 90 to 100 km/h.

By Tuesday afternoon crews had restored power to all but about 3,500 in eastern Ontario.

Belleville fared much better despite a lightning strike on a power line at about 5:20 p.m. Monday.

George Armstrong, manager of regulatory affairs and key projects for Veridian Connections, said the outage was “relatively major” but short-lived.

“We experienced a lightning strike on a line just outside of the Belleville transformer station, which caused us to lose our supply from Hydro One on one feeder,” Armstrong said Tuesday. “It’s not uncommon in a lightning storm.

“That affected service to about 5,000 of our customers, and they were generally located north of Bridge Street and between Sidney Street and MacDonald Ave,” said Armstrong.

The power station is on Centre Street, just east of the Quinte Sports Centre on Cannifton Road.

Armstrong said power on that line was restored fully at 6:38 p.m. Monday.

“We had a few other isolated outages due to falling tree limbs,” he added.

Hydro-Quebec announced Tuesday it will spend $1.9 billion to overhaul the aging Gentilly-2 plant near Trois-Rivieres, Que.

It is hoped the extensive renovations will extend the power plant’s lifespan to 2040.

Hydro-Quebec described Gentilly-2 as a reliable and clean source of energy which helps stabilize Quebec’s power grid.

“We’ll go ahead with the renovation of Gentilly-2 because it’s a plant that has been used safely for 25 years,” the utility’s president, Thierry Vandal, told a news conference.

“The site of the plant is very safe, as much for production as for storing nuclear waste.”

Gentilly-2’s future has been the subject of heated debate for several years.

Environmental groups such as Greenpeace object to keeping the plant open because of what they see as murky long-term plans for dealing with radioactive waste.

“(The government) has had a policy that won’t accept a used-fuel waste site in Quebec,” said Greenpeace energy campaigner Shawn-Patrick Stensil.

“Today, however, they have given the OK to producing more radioactive waste. That’s hypocritical.”

Businesses and unions welcomed the refurbishment project as a much-needed boost for the central Quebec region.

The renovations will result in about $600 million in spinoffs for Quebec and will create about 800 jobs over a 20-month period, in addition to the station’s current staff.

Gentilly-2 came online in 1983 and produces about three per cent of the province’s total energy output. It is Quebec’s only nuclear plant and produces enough electricity to supply 270,000 homes a year.

Most of Hydro-Quebec’s electricity needs are met by hydroelectric power production.

Hydro-Quebec said refurbishing the generating station will begin with engineering and procurement this year, with construction to begin in 2011, with a return-to-service date of 2012.

The nuclear refurbishment in Quebec comes at a time of growth for Canada’s nuclear industry as governments expand their power grids with nuclear energy, avoiding polluting coal-fired plants.

In New Brunswick, NB Power is refurbishing the Point Lepreau nuclear plant to add another 25 years of operating life. The project will cost the utility about $430 million.

In Ontario, the province is expanding its nuclear network, already the most extensive in Canada, with new reactors to be built at the Darlington nuclear generating station east of Toronto by 2018.

The province has asked three companies - Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., Areva NP of France, and Westinghouse, a U.S.-Japanese joint venture - to submit bids to build the reactors by the end of the year.

In Alberta, the Bruce Power partnership, which already operates a nuclear plant in southwestern Ontario. is proposing to build a nuclear generating station in the Peace River region.

If the project is approved, it would be the first nuclear power station in Western Canada, a region of the country where hydroelectric, coal-fired and gas-fired stations produce most of the electricity.

Was replaced

Town Manager Stuart A. Hurd said an older tank, which FEMA recently said could be among hundreds potentially leaking around the country, was replaced with a new tank in 1991.

“There is very little concern of leak,” Hurd said. “The tank is tested annually or biannually.”

FEMA said last week that there are hundreds of underground fuel storage tanks across the country, located mostly at radio stations, that could be leaking.

The Cold War-era tanks were installed because the government wanted to ensure that radio stations could continue to run by generator in case of an attack by the former Soviet Union. Many of the tanks were built and installed in the 1960s, and store as much as 5,000 gallons of diesel fuel.

The underground tank at WBTN is a 2,000-gallon, double-hulled tank that is rarely used — only during power outages, said Hurd, who was able to obtain information about the existence and condition of the tank from the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation.

Neither Hurd, WBTN officials nor FEMA had any information about the tank last week. FEMA said it was in the process of looking into hundreds of tanks that came under its control years ago from the Federal Communications Commission.

It turns out, however, that FEMA no longer controls the WBTN tank, Hurd said. Southern Vermont College is the current owner, but it will soon be transferred to a nonprofit community group that is in the process of purchasing the station.

“The tank is apparently owned by SVC at the present time and ultimately will be owned by the Shires Media Partnership when the deal is finalized,” Hurd said. “It might have been under FEMA’s control at one time, but some time in the past it came under control of the radio station.”

FEMA said last week that leaking tanks could be located at eight radio stations in Vermont. The other stations located in Vermont that may have leaking tanks are WCFR, Springfield; WDEV, Waterbury; WIKE, Newport; WSTJ, St. Johnsbury; WSYB, Rutland; and WVMT, Colchester.