Thousands of Canadians in the dark days after fierce storms knocked out power

Thousands of Canadians spent another day in the cold and dark as hydro crews continued working to restore electricity to those affected by the power outages caused by fierce winter storms last week.

As of Monday evening, power was still out for over 42,000 Hydro-Quebec customers and over 11,000 Hydro One customers.

New Brunswick Power had restored power by Monday evening to a majority of customers who were impacted by the storm, which it said was one of the largest provincewide outage events of the last 25 years. The utility said just under 300 customers were still in the dark as of Monday evening.

NB Power saidearlier Monday it was confident there would be some customers still without power on Tuesday.

Hydro One said it had restored power to more than 430,000 customers since the extreme weather began, but persisting road closures were impacting its crews’ ability to access restricted areas.

Hydro-Québec CEO Sophie Brochu said it was hard to provide a precise estimate for when power would be restored to the customers still without due to the complexity of the remaining jobs.

“Crews are out in full force and have gained access to Walkerton, Picton, Prince Edward County, Napanee and Trenton,” it said in a statement issued Monday evening.

“Efforts to reach customers in Bracebridge and Huntsville continue. Conditions in Bracebridge and Parry Sound may worsen with up to 50 cm of additional snow expected.”

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Brochu said more snow and high winds had complicated access to the sites, many of which were set back from roads and could only be reached by crews on snowshoes or snowmobiles. About half the remaining outages affected five customers or less, which means crews were “working very hard to restore a few people,” she said.

“We might be working three, four, five hours for a team of two to restore five people,” she told reporters in a virtual press briefing Monday morning. “It’s worth it, don’t get me wrong, but it means that instead of working five, six, seven hours and restoring 1,000 people, every (segment) is really slow.”

She acknowledged customer frustration with the inaccurately estimated timelines on Hydro-Québec’s website, saying crews sometimes discover more problems once they arrive. While the “vast majority” of outages will be resolved by Wednesday, she couldn’t promise that nobody would be in the dark by New Year’s Eve.

“Nobody will be forgotten,” she said. “We will have no surrender and no peace until everybody is connected back.”

Southern Ontario’s Niagara Region was on its third day under a state of emergency on Tuesday due to the storm, and some services like garbage and recycling collection were cancelled for Boxing Day.

Environment Canada issued a snow squall warning for the region and warned of reduced visibility due to snowfall that could last until Tuesday afternoon in some areas.

Other parts of southern Ontario, like Barrie, Parry Sound and Grey-Bruce, remained under similar warnings Monday afternoon.

The weather agency also issued wind, freezing rain and snowfall warnings for parts of Alberta, Manitoba and British Columbia, as well as for extreme cold in some parts of the Northwest Territories and Yukon.

Meanwhile, it said temperatures will rise well above the freezing mark throughout much of southern Quebec and Atlantic Canada beginning Wednesday.

Temperatures in Montreal are expected to rise to between 0 C and 9 C during the day and up to 7 C at night. Similar conditions are expected further east, with temperatures approaching 10 C in Fredericton and Saint John, N.B. and Charlottetown, while Halifax could hit 11 C on Saturday.

The warmer weather is expected to last at least four days until New Year’s Eve.

On the other side of the country in British Columbia, four people died, and dozens were injured after a bus rolled over on an icy highway on Saturday night.

Environment Canada warned of ice buildup from ongoing freezing rain in the southern area spanning Whistler and the Fraser Valley to the Okanagan Valley, as well as a special weather statement for much of the Interior, also for possible freezing rain.