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“, estimated the Quebec Minister of Economy and Energy, Pierre Fitzgibbon, during a press briefing on Thursday, when the warnings for freezing rain 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“, tells AFP Jean-Marc Grondin. This 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.