Quebec ice storm: Just under one million customers without power, man crushed by tree branch

Hydro crews in Quebec raced on Thursday to restore power ahead of the Easter long weekend after a fierce ice storm left more than one million customers in the dark and led to the death of a man who was crushed by a tree.

Freezing rain sent ice-laden tree branches crashing down onto power lines, streets and cars, knocking out power to more than a million homes and businesses in Quebec, the province’s electric utility said. More than 1,100 hydro workers were on the ground across the province to restore power.

Hydro-Quebec said in a morning news conference it expected to restore power to between 300,000 and 350,000 clients by the end of the day, and to 70 or 80 per cent of affected customers by midnight Friday.

“I can already confirm to you that there will be some, unfortunately, where it will go into the Easter long weekend, possibly Saturday, depending on some areas that are more complex,” said Regis Tellier, a vice-president of operations and maintenance.

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Provincial police said a man died Thursday morning when he was crushed by a tree branch. They said the man, in his 60s, was attempting to cut down branches on his property in Les Coteaux, Que., southwest of Montreal.

Energy Minister Pierre Fitzgibbon said about half the outages were in the Montreal region, making restoration efforts less complicated than if they were distributed across rural areas. And unlike the 1998 ice storm that left millions in the dark – sometimes for weeks – Wednesday’s storm was more localized and left the utility’s main distribution network intact, he said.

“It’s a crisis – you have to be very sensitive to that; Montreal is currently devastated,” he said in Quebec City. “But I think that the concentration of the outages at the level of the circuit breakers, we think that it will be under control very quickly.”

Tellier said Wednesday’s storm was completely different than the ice storm of 1998 because the current damage largely involves branches touching power lines. Twenty-five years ago, steel transmission towers crumpled under the weight of the ice.

The greatest damage from Wednesday’s bout of freezing rain occurred in western Quebec’s Outaouais region, as well as in the Montreal area and the Monteregie region, Tellier said.

Fallen trees littered a street in a residential neighbourhood north of downtown Montreal, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau toured the damage alongside Mayor Valerie Plante.

As ice pellets fell from trees around him, Trudeau told reporters the federal government would offer help if needed, although he said no request for aid had been made. He said seeing all the downed trees and meeting people whose lives will be disrupted during Easter weekend made him emotional.

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“Obviously there’s never a good time for this, but it’s a moment we pull together and try to be there for each other,” he said.

Trudeau added that climate change has made extreme weather events such as storms, hurricanes and fires more frequent. While it’s impossible to connect any one event to climate change, he said, more efforts will be necessary to help cities and provinces adapt.

Plante said the city would open warming centres for people who need a place to shower or sleep. She said it could take city crews days or weeks to clean up all the fallen branches, and she urged citizens to avoid local parks and to watch out for falling ice.

Premier Francois Legault visited Hydro-Quebec offices in Montreal later in the day and told reporters that the unfortunate death of the man southwest of Montreal was a warning to Quebecers to be careful.

In Ontario, Hydro One said more than 114,000 of its customers were without power as of 10:30 a.m. Thursday. The utility said its crews were working to restore power, even as outages continued to be reported in eastern Ontario because of heavy ice buildup that damaged equipment or caused trees and branches to fall on distribution lines.

Hydro Ottawa issued a statement late Wednesday saying crews paused restoration efforts overnight because of unsafe working conditions caused by poor visibility and falling trees and branches on overhead wires. On Thursday morning, the utility said about 56,000 customers were without power because of freezing rain conditions.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 6, 2023.