Hydro-Québec restores power to 95% of affected addresses after heavy, early snowfall
Posted November 12, 2025 7:21 am.
Last Updated November 13, 2025 7:02 am.
Quebecers are still cleaning up and waiting for power to return after the season’s first major snowstorm left hundreds of thousands in the dark on Tuesday.
By Wednesday afternoon, Hydro-Québec said it was making significant progress restoring electricity across the province, with about 1,000 line workers still on the ground.
As of 7 a.m. Thursday, nearly 5,000 customers remained without power — though some had been in the dark for a third straight day.
At the height of the outages early Tuesday morning, nearly 400,000 homes had lost electricity, and that number was down to 16,680 by 6 p.m., with 90 per cent of customers back on the grid.
Storm knocked out power across several regions
Hydro-Québec crews were out in full force across Quebec, including in Saint-Lambert on Montreal’s South Shore — one of the hardest-hit areas. The utility said the Montérégie, Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean, Lanaudière and Centre-du-Québec regions were the most affected, while Montreal itself had fewer than 500 customers still without power by late Wednesday.
The company said the storm brought between 15 and 25 centimetres of snow since Sunday, hitting a wide corridor that included Montreal, the Montérégie, western Estrie, Mauricie, Centre-du-Québec and Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean.
In some of these regions, school service centres were forced to close schools for a second consecutive day due to ongoing outages.
Heavy, wet snow caused widespread damage
Lynn St-Laurent, a spokesperson for Hydro-Québec, said the early-November storm brought “very heavy, wet snow” that clung to trees still covered in leaves — a combination that made branches heavier and more likely to snap and fall onto power lines.
“The big challenge of this snowstorm was the heaviness of the snow. So we had instead of it falling into rain, as some meteorologists expected, we had this very heavy wet snow that fell on the trees and at an early time. This time in November is not usually when we expect this type of storm,” she said.
Senior director Maxime Nadeau, responsible for Hydro-Québec’s energy system operations, explained that this premature snowfall created unusually high stress on vegetation.
“Many trees hadn’t yet lost their leaves, and that really adds 10 to 30 times more weight to all the vegetation, the branches, which caused more outages. The snow was also very heavy, laden with moisture, three to six times more than normal,” he said.
Network damage ‘relatively minor,’ utility says
Despite the large number of outages, Nadeau said the overall damage to Hydro-Québec’s electrical grid was relatively limited.
“The damage to the network is, in most cases, very minor, which explains the very rapid restoration we’ve seen since yesterday and which will continue today,” he said.
He added that the fact most outages were caused by vegetation, rather than broken infrastructure, made recovery faster. “It’s fairly minor, no poles, no transformers.”
About a quarter of the remaining outages affected between one and five customers, often in hard-to-reach, wooded or isolated areas — known as arrière-lot properties — which slow down restoration efforts.
Hydro-Québec urging safety and patience
Crews were working to repair roughly 700 locations across the province on Wednesday, focusing on smaller, more complex cases.
“It’s important to state also that over 80 per cent of the remaining power outages impact between 1 to 100 customers. So these are often locations that are harder access and it might take a little longer for our crews to get to them. And even 25 per cent of that number is between 1 and 5 customers,” St-Laurent explained.
She urged residents to stay safe and keep their distance from workers and downed power lines.
“As you’re waiting for your power to be restored, it’s a good idea to unplug any equipment that will use a lot of energy. And also we ask that if you see power lines that are down not to get close and to call our services, and please know that our crews are working, putting every effort into restoring power. We’ll be visiting roughly 700 locations today across the province and we’re doing our very best to make sure that the power gets back quickly.”
Crews from outside Quebec called in to help
Nadeau said more than 1,000 Hydro-Québec workers were on the ground Wednesday and would remain mobilized until restoration was complete.
“We’re also calling on companies outside Quebec to make sure we’re covering all the bases and can reconnect all customers as quickly as possible,” he said.
He added that the utility was “very satisfied with the speed” of the restoration so far, noting that around 75 per cent of customers had their service restored within 24 hours.
Building a more resilient grid
Nadeau also reviewed Hydro-Québec’s long-term plan to make the power network more resilient to extreme weather.
“Priority number one of our 2025 action plan is to increase the resilience of our network,” he said. “We’ve already done a lot of work in 2024.”
Among the measures, Hydro-Québec has invested $150 million in vegetation management, removing or securing 85,000 trees to reduce the risk to power lines. The goal is to cover the utility’s 100,000-kilometre network within 10 years — about 20,000 kilometres per year, which is 2.5 times more investment than in 2018.
“The results are already visible,” Nadeau said. For example, 50 per cent of the reductions in outage durations have been achieved, from 1,712 minutes to 522 minutes, representing a true 50 per cent reduction.
Meteorologists say snow came early
Environment and Climate Change Canada meteorologist Simon Legault said Montreal received about 20 centimetres of snow — about three weeks earlier than usual for that amount of accumulation.
“The normal period to receive above 15 centimeters of snow for Montreal is, I would say, the end of November, so we are about three weeks early for the mean period or the mean time that we receive that kind of amount. But from year to year it can change and this year it’s a bit early — not a record period — but we have still seen some accumulation of snow in the past at the end of October. But in the last years surely we have before time that is regular.”
He said no major new snowfall is expected in the coming days, though light flurries may continue until the weekend.
“We’re going to have some very little flurries for the next days, even if we can say it’s gonna be weakening, fading off for the end of the week. But it’s gonna be on and up with very little accumulation, maybe one centimeter at most, so it’s really not at the same kind of snow that we got in the past days.”
Temperatures are expected to hold near plus 1 C overnight, with periods of snow mixed with rain.
Early snow surprises residents
In Longueuil, residents were still feeling the effects of the outage.
“I lost power around 19:00 and it affected me because I didn’t prepare for my day yet,” said one resident. “It didn’t come back yet,” he added around 11:30 a.m. “I’m frustrated.”
Others took the snowfall in stride. “It was a surprise actually. We didn’t expect it this early and it was a lot of snow, a lot of fun. The kids went to school so no disruptions for us,” said one mother.
“We were lucky, but actually some other parents from the school didn’t have electricity through the night, so they got really, really cold,” she added.
“I didn’t think that was that soon that a snowfall would come in November. And I was really surprised. So I put on my snow pants and everybody in the school put them also and we were really shocked that there was a snowfall in November,” her child said.
For some, the storm brought more joy than frustration. “It wasn’t expected but it was super nice. The city is beautiful,” said another resident.
Another system possible this weekend
Legault said another weather system could arrive by Sunday, possibly bringing a mix of snow, freezing rain or plain rain to southern Quebec.
“Don’t expect any real accumulation for the next days. By next weekend, probably on Sunday, we are watching for another system that is coming from the west. It could bring some snow, it could even bring some freezing rain or just plain rain. So it’s again a challenging system that will bring a mix of precipitation in the southern part of the province. We’ll see how Montreal will manage that storm, but surely we have another system that will bring some challenge for the weekend — maybe not for Monday, but surely for Sunday is the most likely period of it.”
Hydro-Québec continues to urge residents to check its online outage map for the latest updates as repairs continue.
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—With files from The Canadian Press, first published in French and translated by CityNews
