Messy weekend weather leaves thousands of Hydro-Québec clients without power

Tens of thousands of Hydro-Québec customers are without power as of Monday morning.

The large majority of those clients are in the Lanaudière and Laurentians, and the utility says areas around Rawdon and Saint-Jérôme are among the hardest hit.  South of Quebec City, the number of outages in the Chaudière-Appalaches region has gone up in the last hour, and as of 8:30 a.m., there were more than 17,000 customers there without power.

This weekend, Environment Canada issued a freezing rain warning for western, central and parts of southern Quebec. The areas covered by the warning were expected to receive between five and 10 millimetres of ice accumulation.

According to Hydro-Québec, half of the outages in the Lanaudière and Laurentians were caused by tree branches that fell on power lines after being weighed down by the accumulation of freezing rain but added that other outages were due to tripped system breakers. 

The utility says it's difficult to say when the power will come back on for everyone. In many cases, falling trees branched played a major role, but the situation on the ground still needs to be diagnosed, said spokesperson Caroline Desrosiers.

"Most outages happened during the night, so this morning the crews are assessing the different outages and seeing what has caused them," she said.

A freezing rain warning is now in effect in and around Quebec City and Trois-Rivières as well as the Saguenay and Gaspé regions.

"Our teams will be ready to intervene in the regions where the system could affect our network," Desrosiers said.

Freezing rain also hit Ontario this weekend, where 390,000 customers are still without power as of Monday morning. The utility in Ontario says it could be days before it restores power for every affected customer.