Thousands remain in the dark days after fierce storms knocked out power

Hydro One says it has restored power to more than 412,000 customers since the extreme weather began, but persisting road closures are impacting its crews’ ability to access restricted areas.

Hydro-Québec CEO Sophie Brochu says it’s hard to provide a precise estimate for when power will be restored to the final 70,000 or so customers due to the complexity of the remaining jobs.

She says more snow and high winds have complicated access to the sites, many of which are set back from roads and can only be reached by crews on snowshoes or snowmobiles. About half the remaining outages affect five customers or less, which means crews are “working very hard to restore a few people.”

“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 inaccurate 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.”

A Christmas Eve train derailment is also continuing to wreak havoc on holiday travel plans in Ontario and Quebec.

After cancelling all Christmas Day trains on its Toronto-Ottawa and Toronto-Montreal routes, Via Rail tweeted Sunday evening that it was also cancelling all Boxing Day trains on the corridors due to the ongoing complications.

southern Ontario’s Niagara Region is entering its third day under a state of emergency due to the storm, and some services like garbage and recycling collection have been cancelled for Boxing Day.

Environment Canada has 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 are under similar warnings.

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

Meanwhile, it says 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.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 26, 2022.

The Canadian Press

by Canadian Press

Thousands remain in the dark days after fierce storms knocked out power

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