About 450,000 families were still without power as of 4:30 p.m. local time on Friday. That is already a lot less than the 1.1 million families at the height of the storm. “We know that for some customers it will take until Sunday, possibly Monday, for power to be restored,” said Régis Tellier, a spokesman for energy supplier Hydro-Québec.
The city of Montreal, the largest in the province of Quebec where about half of the power outages occurred, opened six emergency shelters where residents spent the night without power. The storm hit Quebec and Ontario, Canada’s two most populous provinces. It was the largest power outage in Quebec since 1998, when the province was plunged into chaos for weeks.