After a glorious weekend in terms of weather and performances, the rain came on Monday and gave the Festival d’été de Québec (FEQ) a heavy, cold shower.
It was very easy to count the number of festival-goers waiting for the gates to open to enter the plain, near the monument to the Sacrificial Cross.
Stevens LeBlanc / Le Journal de Quebec
Sarah and Jason, two die-hard Les Trois Accords fans who were scheduled to perform that night, waited almost two hours in the pouring rain to see their favorite band perform on the FEQ’s main stage.
“Even if there had been a tornado, we wouldn’t have missed it,” jokes the young woman. They put on a very good show and it’s not a bit of rain that can stop them, although the sun would have been better.
Her boyfriend was still hoping music lovers would come in large numbers to “support the first Quebec headliner this year.”
Others, like Maya and her friends Alizée, Charlotte, Violette and Émile, almost all only had one evening for the festival and expected to make the most of it despite the incessant rain.
Stevens LeBlanc / Le Journal de Quebec
“We traveled from Victoriaville specifically for this show and it was our only chance to come this year. We would have wished for nice weather, but what can we do there besides enjoying it? At least we know that we will be well positioned!”
Quiet evening
As usual, well filled before the shows, the terraces of the Grande Allée were completely deserted during the passage of the journal around 5:15 p.m.
Stevens LeBlanc / Le Journal de Quebec
“It’s a shame,” admits Richard, waiter at Brasserie Inox. At this time it is always full. People come for a drink before queuing but not tonight.
If disappointed that the customers weren’t there on Monday, the waiter consoles himself by thinking back to the very busy evenings of last Thursday and Friday. Thousands of people fled from the blazing sun under umbrellas with drinks in hand.
Torrential rains
Much to the chagrin of FEQ and music lovers of all genres, the experts are predicting that the bad weather won’t really stop for the next few days. In an interview on LCN, meteorologist Gilles Brien explained that the low-pressure system sweeping across Quebec is an “atmospheric flow”.
Stevens LeBlanc / Le Journal de Quebec
“The ground has been saturated with water for two weeks. We got 50 to 100 mm of rain. It’s been more than a month of rain that fell in a few days […]”, he argued.
“It will continue until Wednesday. It’s not really good for people who are on vacation […] The rain is also spreading in Montreal, but in Montreal we are saved a little, we can experience 30mm of rain, but if you go east, towards Quebec, towards Trois-Rivières, you really have to expect heavy torrential downpours .”