MONTREAL: Hundreds of thousands of homes in Quebec were still without power on Friday, two days after an ice storm swept through eastern Canada that killed three people and caused extensive property damage, mostly in Montreal.

The storm caused Quebec’s worst power outage in 25 years, and about 400,000 homes were left in the dark as of 5:30 p.m. (2130 GMT) on Friday, compared with 1.1 million at the height of the bad weather.

The public electricity company “Hydro-Québec” solved about 50% of the problems. Our goal is to have around 80% of homes reconnected tonight and 95% by tomorrow night,” said Quebec Premier François Legault during a press conference.

“Patience and be careful,” he added, calling on people to help each other.

François Legault also announced the death of a man at his home about fifty kilometers northwest of Montreal. The man died after being poisoned with carbon monoxide while using a power generator in his garage, police later said.

That death, the third since the storm began, comes on top of that of a resident in eastern Ontario who was killed by a falling tree on Wednesday and that of a 60-year-old in Quebec who was fatally injured by a tree branch as he tried to clear his garden on Thursday.

Montreal health officials have also registered about sixty reports of carbon monoxide poisoning, including families using grills in their homes to warm up.

Power was gradually restored throughout the day. “We know it will take until Sunday, possibly Monday, for some customers,” said Régis Tellier, spokesman for Hydro-Québec.

Temporary emergency shelter

The city of Montreal, which experienced about half of the outages, opened six shelters. Residents without electricity could stay overnight there.

In one of them, in the Verdun district (southwest of Montreal), about thirty people came to warm up, drink coffee, eat or charge their electronic devices on the first day of the long Easter weekend.

“It was mostly boring, I had work planned and it held me up a bit, but it’s not the end of the world,” says Isabelle, a 28-year-old teacher who declined to give her last name. .

Accompanied by her mother and her two boys aged 8 and 3, Rosalie Gouba is saddened to have had to throw away the food reserves for the next few months due to the shutdown of her fridge and seen the meltdown continue.

“The first night was very difficult because I’m afraid of sleeping in complete darkness. Because I’m stressed, so are the children,” says the 30-year-old mother, who came with books to keep them busy.

Hundreds of employees from Metropolitan Quebec were still at the scene on Friday, mostly in parks where many branches were scattered on the ground after collapsing under the weight of the ice.

Below a temperature of around 1°C, the ice had melted, but gusts of wind shook the trees, risking more branches falling. The authorities always advised the population not to go near the power lines.

The municipal parks, in particular the Mont-Royal, the hill that dominates the city, remained closed.

Bad weather affected Quebec and Ontario, Canada’s two most populous provinces.

The French-speaking province was thrown into chaos for several weeks by a massive ice storm in 1998.