Toronto/CMEDIA: With this weekend’s ice storm moving east, over 200,000 Ontarians are without power threatening parts of New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.
Although power to more than 100,000 customers over the weekend has been restored by Hydro One, Ontario’s provincial utility, nearly 225,000 are still in the dark.
Accumulation of ice on tree branches caused many of them to snap bringing down power lines with them, Hydro One was reported saying.
Whereas cottage country experienced most of the outages, tens of thousands of customers between the eastern edge of the Greater Toronto Area and Kingston, Ont., also lost power overnight.
Freezing rain warnings have been issued by Environment Canada for northeastern and southern Ontariohas, starting north of Timmins, extending as far south as Brantford.
According to the weather alerts with the temperatures rising, the areas hardest hit yesterday including the Barrie region where tens of thousands are still without power could see localized flooding today.
“There have been many reports of trees down, branches down, unfortunately, some of them hitting infrastructure, such as houses or power poles,” Kristina Kretchman, meteorologist for Environment Canada, reported saying that the ice storm did damage.
Following the assessment of damage caused for each outage, Hydro One said it would be able to determine when power will be restored. Kaitlyn Forde, spokesperson for the provincial utility, said on Sunday.
The warnings extend through Quebec, where freezing rain is expected to continue into the evening, to Prince County, P.E.I., where Environment Canada says the freezing rain could last for four hours and see five millimetres of ice build-up.
New Brunswick is also under freezing rain warnings, and Environment Canada warns snow today could turn to freezing rain overnight before a warm front moves in late Monday morning.
Kaitlyn Forde, spokesperson for the provincial utility, said on Sunday that customers should check Hydro One’s online outage map for updated information. Currently, the outage map says restoration may not be until 11 p.m. on Tuesday.
Freezing rain warning which began in parts of southern Ontario early Saturday afternoon. has been lifted for Toronto and other areas in the GTA by about 9:30 a.m. Sunday as the temperature rose above freezing.
Hydro One spokesperson Tiziana Baccega Rosa had said In an earlier interview that some areas in the province, which are known as water-access only, may be without power for more than 24 hours.
Rosa added that as Workers will need to either fly in by helicopter or use boats, which they cannot do until the storm is over.
