White Christmas of darkness and death
More than 500,000 homes and businesses were still without power yesterday in parts of the central and northeastern United States and into Canada after a weekend ice and snow storm rolled across the region. At least 17 people have been killed in the storm.
The US National Weather Service said more snow was expected to move into the Northern High Plains and Central Rockies before rolling into the Great Lakes and Midwest by this morning.
In Canada, five people are reported dead from apparent carbon monoxide poisoning. Police said two people in Ontario died after using a gas generator to heat their blacked-out home northeast of Toronto.
Police in Quebec said carbon monoxide poisoning was believed to be the cause of three deaths in a chalet on the province’s North Shore.
Scraping through:
Toronto officials said 85,000 customers were still without power yesterday. Although that was down from 300,000 people at the height of the weekend outages, some were likely to be in the dark until after Christmas.
In Quebec, 31,700 customers remained without power yesterday. In New Brunswick, more than 40,000 customers were still in the dark.
The region was under a cold alert, with temperatures expected to be well below freezing today.
Some US states kept emergency shelters open for people without power.
The number of customers in Maine without power spiked to more than 100,000 yesterday, even as Central Maine Power Co sent more than 1000 workers to help restore power throughout the state.
That was the case, too, in Michigan, wherethe state’s largest utility said it had not had this many outages during any Christmas week since its founding 126 years ago. Close to 17 per cent of its 1.8 million electric customers lost power during the storm that hit on Sunday; roughly 152,000 remained without it yesterday.