MONTREAL — The blackout caused by this week's deadly ice storm saw Quebecers restocking their fridges and eyeing alternative accommodations on Saturday as it stretched into a third full day for thousands of residents.
Hydro-Québec said roughly 122,000 customers remained in the dark as of midnight Sunday after the storm sent ice-laden branches crashing down onto power lines, streets and cars.
Utility and provincial officials said efforts to restore power will continue, though at a slower pace now that the largest outages have been resolved and the remaining ones mostly lie in less accessible areas.
The province also announced some grocery stores could remain open on Easter Sunday — a statutory holiday — to help residents running low on food after the blackout.
"Obviously one of the issues (is) people are unable to keep food in their fridge," provincial Energy Minister Pierre Fitzgibbon told a Saturday morning news conference.
The temporary measure applies to stores in six particularly hard-hit regions: Montreal, Montérégie, Laval, Outaouais, Laurentides and Lanaudière.
Lyse St-Germain, a resident of Montreal's Ahuntsic-Cartierville borough, couldn't wait until Sunday to shop. She spent part of Saturday replenishing the "hundreds of dollars" worth of groceries that went bad during the more than 48 hours she spent in the dark.
“I’ve lost everything,” she said in an interview outside a Maxi grocery store near her home.
St-Germain said she lost power around 4 p.m. on Wednesday and only saw it restored on Saturday around noon.
“I had just bought a bunch of meat from Costco. My freezer was full. We had to eat at restaurants a couple of times these last few days, and it’s very expensive with the current inflation,” she said.
Her apartment was so cold that she considered booking a hotel room but decided against it because the prices were too “outrageous.”
Grocery shopping was also on the agenda for Mildred Clement, who spent the past two days at her son's home along with her 89-year-old mother.
Clement, who lives in Montreal's hard-hit Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie borough, had her power restored on Friday — too late to salvage most groceries.
“We brought as much food with us as we could, but we could not bring everything. We lost a lot of the food in our freezer. And we tried to cook as much meat as possible at my son’s. My elderly mother lost everything she had in her freezer. I think that everyone is exhausted,” she said.
Clement is now considering buying a generator in anticipation of similar future storms caused by climate change.
Earlier on Saturday, Hydro-Québec officials laid out reasons why repairs were expected to slow in the coming days.
"The bulk part of our distribution system has been restored, so now we are doing some work on outages with a smaller amount of customers attached to them," Maxime Nadeau, the utility's director of energy system control, said at the morning news conference. "So when we restore an outage, fewer customers regain power. So the rhythm of restoration will be slower."
Nadeau said some of the roughly 3,000 remaining outages are in hard-to-access areas or are trickier to resolve, which will also slow the progress.
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.
Nadeau said he hopes almost everyone will have their lights on by Sunday, but it may take a little longer for some.
Fitzgibbon also attributed the grocery store measure to the slower pace of repairs, noting it would benefit those waiting longest to come back on the grid.
Metro Inc., parent company for grocery chains Metro, Super C and Adonis, issued a statement on Saturday saying some of its stores would be open to prospective Sunday shoppers.
"METRO Inc. is once again responding to the government’s call to ensure the population’s food security under exceptional circumstances,” the statement said.
The company also thanked its employees who agreed to work on a voluntary basis on the federal holiday.
Meanwhile, in eastern Ontario, Hydro One said just under 5,000 of its customers were still in the dark as of midnight Sunday, while Hydro Ottawa said about 600 customers were awaiting power as of 9 p.m. Saturday.
The storm is being blamed for three deaths in the two affected provinces, with the most recent a 75-year-old man in Saint-Joseph-du-Lac, Que., who died from carbon monoxide poisoning after running a generator in his garage.
Montreal's health authority said dozens of people suffered from carbon monoxide poisoning Friday after using outdoor appliances inside during the blackout.
As of Saturday afternoon, the local health authority said it had evaluated 135 people in connection with carbon monoxide poisoning, of which 102 people had to be taken to hospital. No deaths have been reported.
Another man died while attempting to cut down tree branches on his property in Les Coteaux, Que., on Thursday.
Provincial police have said that man was struck by one of the branches and died at the scene.
Meanwhile, Ontario Provincial Police confirmed Friday that another man died on Wednesday after he, too, was struck by a falling tree branch at his home in South Stormont, Ont.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 8, 2023.
— With files from Nicole Thompson in Toronto.
Marisela Amador, The Canadian Press
