Major disruption in Lévis: Valero refinery in Saint-Romuald without power

More than 37,000 Hydro-Québec customers were without power Wednesday morning.

The Valero refinery in Saint-Romuald is also located there. As a preventive measure, all production units at the Jean-Gaulin refinery in Chemin des Isles were shut down.

“As expected in such a situation, the refinery’s emergency systems went into action. This resulted in higher than normal releases at the blaze. […] The refinery’s emergency coordination center was quickly mobilized and the situation is under control,” the company said in a press release.

Areas affected are Saint-Nicolas, Saint-Romuld and downtown Lévis. There was an interruption for about thirty minutes.

At this time, Hydro-Québec has not been able to determine the cause of this major outage. “An anomaly was detected in the line. In these cases, power is disrupted throughout the transmission network,” spokeswoman Annie Beaudin said.

After noon Wednesday, most Levis residents had their power restored.

As of 12:20 p.m., 673 customers were still without it due to five breakdowns.