Seven days after deadly storms, thousands of Quebecers have no power


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Shortly after 7 pm, about 13,000 Hydro-Québec clients had no electricity, with most of them in the Laurentians. The two other regions most affected by the outages are the Lanaudière and Outaouais.

Hydro-Québec warned further outages could occur while crews work to restore service. Friday morning, there were about 7,000 more clients without electricity more than at the end of Thursday evening. The utility said crews would be working over the weekend to restore power as quickly as possible.

Hydro-Québec president and chief executive officer Sophie Brochu said the extent of the disaster was the worst since the 1998 ice storm.

The line of severe thunderstorms hit a swath of territory 300 kilometers long by 100 kilometers wide, a scale rarely seen. As many as 500 poles and 100 transformers will have been replaced by the end of the restoration work.

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Eleven people died as a result of Saturday’s storms, nine in Ontario and one in Quebec. The latest death, reported Thursday, is that of a 58-year-old man who Ontario police said was struck by a falling tree in a remote area of ​​the town of Marmora & Lake.

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