More Than 130,000 Still Without Power in Quebec Following Deadly Ice Storm

More Than 130,000 Still Without Power in Quebec Following Deadly Ice Storm
City workers clear fallen branches in Montreal on April 6, 2023, after an ice storm which initially left over a million customers without power. Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press
The Canadian Press
Updated:

More than 115,000 customers in Quebec are still without power as Hydro−Québec makes repairs to its energy grid after last week’s deadly ice storm.

Most of the remaining outages are in the Montreal region, where 82,000 customers are in the dark.

Hydro−Québec says some of the roughly 3,000 remaining outages are in hard−to−access areas or are trickier to resolve, slowing the progress of repairs.

The province has announced some grocery stores can remain open on Easter Sunday — a statutory holiday — to help residents running low on food after the blackout.

The temporary measure applies to stores in six particularly hard−hit regions: Montreal, Monteregie, Laval, Outaouais, Laurentides and Lanaudiere.

More than a million people were without power at the peak of the outages caused by Wednesday’s storm, which left large swaths of southern Quebec and eastern Ontario under a coat of ice and is being linked to three deaths.