Two people died, on Thursday, and more than a million Hydro-Quebec customers went without power in Canada’s two most densely populated provinces in the aftermath of a powerful weather system that brought freezing rain and strong winds.
Repairs were expected to continue for days, meaning many Canadians in an area stretching from Montreal to Ottawa could spend Easter weekend in the dark.
One man was killed in Quebec when a tree fell on him. Another man died in Ontario when he was struck by a falling tree branch. Montreal was one of the areas most affected in Quebec, accounting for about half of the total outages in the largely French-speaking province.
In the city of Ottawa—Canada’s capital located in Ontario province—restoration crews were expected to bring power back by noon to a large portion of the 65,000 customers affected in that city. Most Montreal schools were temporarily closed, as well.
Ice storms are often more dreaded than snowstorms in North America, as often a coating of merely a fraction of a centimeter of ice can stifle traffic and bring down trees and power lines. Snowfall, however, usually presents much less of a problem for infrastructure, as schools in Canada have been known to remain open with snowfall accumulations exceeding 50 cm.