By The Canadian Press on April 9, 2023.
More than 130,000 customers in Quebec are still without power as Hydro-Québec makes repairs to its energy grid after last week’s deadly ice storm. Most of the remaining outages are in the Montreal region. Hydro-Québec says some of the roughly 3,000 remaining outages are in hard-to-access areas or are trickier to resolve, slowing the progress. The province has announced some grocery stores can remain open on Easter Sunday – a statutory holiday – to help residents running low on food after the blackout. The temporary measure applies to stores in six particularly hard-hit regions: Montreal, Monteregie, Laval, Outaouais, Laurentides and Lanaudiere. More than a million people were without power at the peak of the outages caused by Wednesday’s storm, which left large swaths of southern Quebec and eastern Ontario under a coat of ice and is being linked to three deaths. This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 9, 2023. 8