“Patience and be careful. The Prime Minister of Quebec, François Legault, took stock of the situation in the region, calling on the population to help each other, while hundreds of thousands of homes were still without electricity this Friday, two days after the passage of an ice storm in eastern Canada.
About 450,000 homes remained in the dark at 4:30 p.m. (10:30 p.m. in Paris), compared to 1.1 million at the height of the bad weather. The public electricity supplier “Hydro-Québec has settled about 50% of the situations. We have the objective that this evening, about 80% of the residences be reconnected and by tomorrow evening, 95%, ”said François Legault.
The Prime Minister also announced the death of a man who used a barbecue inside his home located about forty kilometers northwest of Montreal. This death is the third since the start of the storm: it is added to that of a resident of eastern Ontario killed by a falling tree on Wednesday and that of a 60-year-old in Quebec fatally injured by a branch while trying to clear his garden on Thursday.
“The first night was very difficult”
As the day progressed, the power was gradually restored. “We know that for some customers it will last until Sunday, potentially Monday,” according to Régis Tellier, spokesman for Hydro-Québec. “More favorable weather conditions” throughout the day should “accelerate the restoration of service”, he said.
The city of Montreal, where about half of the blackouts occurred, opened six emergency shelters, where residents without electricity spent the night. In one of them, located in the Verdun district (southwest of Montreal), about thirty people came to warm up, drink coffee, eat or charge their electronic devices on the first day of the long weekend of Easter.
“It was mostly boring, I had planned to work and it delayed me a bit, but it’s not the end of the world,” said Isabelle, a 28-year-old teacher. Accompanied by her mother and her two boys aged 8 and 3, Rosalie Gouba was sorry to have had to throw away the food reserves for the next few months because of the shutdown of her refrigerator, and to see the breakdown continue. “The first night was very difficult, because I’m afraid to sleep in complete darkness. Since I’m stressed, the children are too, “said this 30-year-old mother, who came with books to occupy them.
Carbon monoxide poisoning
Montreal health authorities have also recorded around 60 reports of carbon monoxide poisoning, families using, for example, barbecues inside their homes to warm up. Hundreds of employees of the Quebec metropolis were still deployed on the ground on Friday, especially in parks where many branches were strewn on the ground after collapsing under the weight of the ice.
Under a temperature of around 1°C, the ice had melted, but gusts of wind were shaking the trees, with the risk of further falling branches. The authorities always advised the population not to approach the electric wires. The municipal parks, in particular that of Mont-Royal, the hill which dominates the city, remained closed.
The storm affected Quebec and Ontario, the two most populous provinces in Canada. This is the biggest outage on Quebec’s power grid since 1998, when the province was plunged into chaos for several weeks.