Candlelight Seder: Montreal Spends Pesach in the Dark

VINnews
Photos: Hydro-Québec

There was a massive blackout in Montreal over the first days of Pesach and Shabbos Chol Hamoed, impacting over a million people, which resulted from an ice storm.

Frum Jewish residents apparently lost power for many hours, maybe longer. Over 1.1 million customers across Quebec lost power at the height of an outage following a deadly ice storm on Erev Yom Tov.

Over 90,000 people in Montreal are said to still be without power, as the blackout stretched into a third full day. Hydro-Québec crews have been working throughout the weekend to restore power.

More than 900,000 customers have had their power restored.

At a news conference Shabbos, Hydro-Québec said most households will hopefully regain power by the end of the weekend, but to the frustration of many, they couldn’t give a precise timeline.

Jewish families in Montreal reportedly had a lack of power over Yom Tov, which likely made it particularly stressful to keep food from spoiling and remain warm. There is no word on the number of frum families impacted by the outages.

Maxime Nadeau, the director of energy system control at Hydro-Québec, said, “We want to make sure we can restore things as quickly as possible,” he said.

“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. When we restore an outage, fewer customers regain power, so the rhythm of restoration will be slower.”

He also called on Quebecers to be careful with using gas-powered appliances indoors after one man died from carbon monoxide poisoning.

A Montreal public health official said Saturday that 135 people in the city have been treated for carbon monoxide poisoning since Wednesday.

“Just to put that in perspective, in a normal year, we get a couple of dozen. In a whole year. So this is way, way out of proportion,” said Dr. David Kaiser, deputy medical director at Montreal public health.

He said the cases are primarily related to people using barbecues or camping stoves indoors to do heating or cooking, as well as generators being too close to homes or near air inlets.