1 dead, hundreds of thousands still without power after Quebec ice storm
'My message to Quebecers is to be patient,' premier says
The latest:
- At least one person died after being hit by a falling branch.
- Falling ice slowed traffic on Jacques-Cartier, Champlain Bridge.
- Schools are cancelled in much of the Montreal area.
- As of 7:30 p.m. ET Thursday, about 800,000 Hydro-Québec customers were without power.
- Hydro-Québec says most households will have power back within 24 hours. CBC will have live coverage here and you can follow updates on CBC Radio One.
- If the power or data on your device is low, get your storm updates on CBC Lite. It's our low-bandwidth, text-only website.
- To keep an eye on the outages, click here.
Public utility crews are working to restore electricity to hundreds of thousands of customers Thursday after an ice storm wreaked havoc on the power grid in southern Quebec and killed at least one person.
The storm cut power to more than a million customers Wednesday afternoon, and as of 7:30 p.m. ET — nearly 24 hours later — a little more than 800,000 were still without electricity.
Premier François Legault said most people would have their power restored by Friday night, but some 300 to 350,000 people may still be without electricity on Saturday.
"My message to Quebecers is to be patient," he said at an afternoon news conference at Hydro-Québec headquarters. "It's not at all like the ice storm of 1998 because we are in April, not in January. We don't expect to have three or four days of freezing rain."
Most of the outages were in the greater Montreal area, Legault said.
Hydro-Québec has deployed about 1,100 workers to restore power, but the crews are facing more than 2,200 outages, Pierre Fitzgibbon, the minister responsible for the Montreal area, said at a Thursday morning news conference.
The good news, he added, was that 25 per cent of those outages were large, affecting more than 1,000 people each. That means the workers could prioritize those outages, and, Fitzgibbon said, one-third of those without power would have it by the end of the day on Thursday.
"I think it's under control," Fitzgibbon said. "Montreal is devastated currently … but we think it will be under control very quickly."
Régis Tellier, the vice-president of operations and maintenance for Hydro-Québec, said most clients should have their power back in the next 24 hours, but some "more complex" outages would continue into the weekend.
Sophie Brochu, the president and CEO of Hydro-Québec, said the provincial power utility is doing everything it can "to get the power back on as fast as possible."
Brochu and Tellier asked drivers in Montreal to move their vehicles if they see Hydro-Québec crews on their streets.
Tellier said the priority is to restore power in hospitals and municipal infrastructure, but the storm had caused nowhere near the damage to the electrical distribution network as the 1998 ice storm, which toppled major transmission lines. This storm has mostly affected local transmission lines.
Traffic was slow throughout the Montreal-area on Thursday. Ice falling from the city's bridges became a concern. It forced partial closures on the Jacques-Cartier and Champlain bridges.
On Thursday afternoon, the Champlain Bridge was fully reopened.
Falling branch kills man west of Montreal
Provincial police have confirmed a death in connection with the storm.
They say a falling branch killed a man in his 60s on Thursday morning.
The man was cutting the branches of a tree in the backyard of his home in Les Coteaux, about 70 kilometres southwest of Montreal, when a branch fell on him. He was declared dead at the scene.
"I think we can't have a better example for Quebecers to be careful, to be careful with trees and to be careful, of course, with electrical wires," Legault said.
Flooding south of Montreal
Environment Canada said 40 millimetres of precipitation fell on the metropolis on Wednesday, much of it freezing rain that coated tree limbs, breaking branches and tumbling them onto power lines.
The rain and ice led to flooding in Châteauguay, which is on Montreal's South Shore.
Châteauguay Mayor Éric Allard called for emergency measures and said parts of the town have been flooded.
"It's really catastrophic," he said.
About 200 homes were flooded, while another 10,000 are at risk because of overflowing sewers.
Trudeau, city officials respond
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante surveyed the damage on Thursday.
Speaking to reporters in front of downed trees and ice-coated electrical wires, Trudeau pledged the support of the federal government to help municipalities and provincial authorities as they began to clean up the storm debris.
Plante asked Montrealers to avoid parks, where large tree limbs could fall. She also said drivers should move their cars if city workers or Hydro-Québec teams were working in their area. The city would not be handing out parking tickets, she said.
The city is moving to open libraries and cultural centres for those who need to warm up or charge their devices and would open some centres for those who need to sleep, including the Centre Lasallien, in the Villeray–Saint-Michel–Park-Extension borough.
Emergency centres for people without power were also being established in Cantley, which is in the Outaouais region, and in Laval.
You can find more details on where you can go if you need to charge your phone or who to call if you see a downed tree, here:
The outages are mainly caused by falling branches or trees that gave way under the weight of the ice. Most of those affected were in the Montreal area and the Outaouais region.
Montreal officials said they are still working on picking up branches and debris from the street, which could take days.
In the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighbourhood, neighbours helped each other break down massive trees that laid across roads, in yards and on cars.
Dominic Vocisano used a hacksaw to remove a hefty branch from a fallen maple. Many of the trees had already fallen on Wednesday afternoon, he said.
"There were downed trees everywhere. I tried to park last night and there were firetrucks blocking the roads everywhere," he said. "A lot of trees had fallen down. I was concerned for my own car."
One of those trees fell on Mark Lazare's car and part of his home.
"I was in the back of the house. I had my computer working and I thought a bomb went off," he said, recalling the moment the tree fell. "For a second I thought it was even an earthquake. The whole house shook. I came outside and saw what happened."
But Lazare was in good spirits on Thursday, even though the tree took out the electrical wires leading to his house, leaving him without power or heat.
"As long as it doesn't get cold I'll be okay," he said. "I've been keeping warm cutting this tree."
Olivier Van Neste, the director general of Vaudreuil-Dorion, a municipality west of Montreal said the power outage was the worst he's seen since taking on his role.
"We're expecting it to last maybe a day or two at least because it's a lot of separate incidents," he said.
Most schools in the Montreal area closed
The English Montreal School Board, Sir Wilfrid Laurier School Board, Lester B. Pearson School Board, Sir Wilfrid Laurier School Board, Centre de services scolaire de la Pointe-de-l'Île and Centre de services scolaire de Montréal cancelled classes Thursday due to the weather conditions and power outages.
John Abbott College, Dawson College, Vanier College and Marianopolis College are also closed.
Parents can check their school's websites for more information.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
with files from Daybreak