Half the city without electricity, all schools closed and streets strewn with trees: an ice storm caused considerable material damage Thursday in Montreal, the day after it passed through eastern Canada.
"Montreal is devastated" but the situation is "under control", said the Quebec Minister of Economy and Energy, Pierre Fitzgibbon, during a press briefing Thursday, when the freezing rain warnings were lifted. .
The authorities, however, called for caution, in particular advising against wooded areas and the population from approaching trees and fallen wires.
A man in his sixties died Thursday morning crushed under the weight of a branch he was trying to cut in his garden, about sixty km west of the French-speaking metropolis.
In total in the country, just over a million homes were still without electricity Thursday afternoon, the vast majority of them in Quebec, but some lines had been restored. These outages were mainly due to falling trees that gave way under the weight of the ice and damaged power lines.
Traffic lights, bicycles, cars, vegetation... in Montreal, everything had been covered by a thick layer of ice since Wednesday evening. Preliminary data shows that 3 to 4 cm of ice fell on the city in a few hours.
"In the last 20 years, it's the worst ice storm we've had," Jean-Marc Grondin told AFP. The 64-year-old retiree, who lives in the Plateau, a central district of the city, went out to see the electrical transformer which caught fire after a tree fell on Wednesday.
A few meters further, city officials are hard at work, saws in hand. “It will take several weeks to clean up the whole city,” explains Samuel, a municipal agent who did not give his last name.
Centers have been opened to accommodate residents without electricity, as temperatures approach zero and restoring power to everyone could take several days.
By early afternoon, two of the city's main bridges remained partially closed.
“Unfortunately we can think that with climate change there will be more and more events of this type in the coming years”, recognized François Legault, Prime Minister of Quebec.
This is the biggest outage on Quebec's power grid since the 1998 ice storm, which plunged the province into chaos for several weeks.
"It's a difficult day for Montrealers, for people across Quebec and parts of Ontario who are suffering from power outages," said Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, traveling to Montreal.
04/06/2023 21:44:56 - Montréal (AFP) - © 2023 AFP
