Unacceptable: Madawaska Power Outages
STATEMENT: Madawaska Power Outages
Two major outages in one week. The same transmission line. The same failure repeating itself. The same excuses.
This is what happens when a government has a structural problem and chooses to patch it instead of fix it.
Edmundston and Haut-Madawaska are served by a single transmission line, one that is over fifty years old. When it fails, the entire region goes dark. There is no backup.
Businesses lose tens of thousands of dollars per hour. A hospital runs without full power. Seniors can’t get breakfast. Emergency services are compromised because the cell network fails alongside the grid.
This is not bad luck. It is a known architectural vulnerability.
For over ten years, elected officials in this region have raised the alarm. The problem is well documented. What is missing is action.
NB Power has replaced poles, upgraded equipment, and managed vegetation on the L0070 line, maintenance work on an aging system, but none of it addresses the fundamental problem: a single feed with no redundancy serving an entire regional economy.
The real fix is a second transmission source. NB Power’s own timeline had that work five years away. The City of Edmundston has demanded it be accelerated. Premier’s response has been hollow words.
You cannot recruit investment, grow a business, or keep young families in a region where the power grid has a single point of failure.
That’s not a northern New Brunswick problem. That’s a government priority problem.
The Madawaska region deserves infrastructure built for growth, not managed for decline.
Get your ballot today to help me become the next leader of PCNB.