Hundreds of thousands in Quebec without power — again — due to storms, forest fires
Majority of affected Hydro-Québec customers in Montreal, Laval and Montérégie
As tornado alerts — including a water tornado — sounded off in several regions of southern Quebec, nearly 500,000 Hydro-Québec customers lost power on Thursday.
Earlier in the day, Hydro-Québec said the outages were caused by forest fires in the James Bay region in northern Quebec, which triggered grid protection mechanisms.
Hundreds of thousands of customers are still without power and the utility now says the majority of the lingering outages are due to the storms that battered the greater Montreal area.
As of 6:15 p.m., there were still more than 360,000 customers in the province without power. The vast majority of the outages are in Montreal, Laval and the Montérégie region.
Over 53,000 customers in the Lanaudière region are without power.
The mass outages come exactly one week after the triggering of another protection mechanism knocked out the power for about 200,000 Hydro-Québec customers in Montreal.