Freezing Rain Leaves More Than 900,000 Without Power
More than 900,000 electricity customers in Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, were without power on Sunday as a spring storm brought freezing rain and sleet to the Great Lakes region.
Ice from the storm covered tree branches, snapping some power lines on Saturday, and created hazardous driving conditions.
A National Weather Service office in Michigan posted photos on social media of trees weighed down with icicles. Accumulations of ice there ranged from half an inch to nearly an inch, the Weather Service said.
In Ontario, images on social media showed downed and ice-encased trees, some of which were making roads impassable.
About 40 miles south of Ottawa, four people were seriously injured after two cars rolled into a ditch during poor weather conditions, the Ontario Provincial Police said on social media. They recommended against nonessential travel, and advised drivers to “SLOW DOWN.”
More than a million people in parts of Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Vermont and Wisconsin were under an ice storm warning late Sunday morning through the evening.
In Michigan, state officials activated the State Emergency Operations Center after the ice storm downed trees and power lines, making some roads impassable in the northern part of the state.
In eastern Canada, the authorities in Quebec warned of freezing rain and nearly half an inch of ice on Sunday, according to Environment Canada.
This ice storm is producing more ice than usual, said Harold Dippman, a meteorologist at the Weather Service office in Gaylord, Mich. A typical one in the region produces one-tenth to a quarter of an inch of ice.
The storm is also lasting longer than usual. A typical one lasts six to 12 hours, Mr. Dippman said, but this storm started on Saturday evening and could last until Sunday night.
In Michigan, about 360,000 customers were without power on Sunday evening, according to the monitoring site poweroutage.us. It said that around 62,000 customers were without power in neighboring Wisconsin, and more than 110,000 were without power in Indiana.
In Ontario, more than 400,000 customers were without power on Sunday evening, according to poweroutage.com. The outages, concentrated in central and eastern Ontario, were largely caused by ice that weighed down tree branches, Hydro One, Ontario’s main power transmission company, said on its website.
Hydro One said power had already been restored to over 257,000 customers.
In the Northeast, temperatures will continue to rise on Sunday, putting an end to an icing threat in the southern and western Adirondacks, Upper Hudson Valley, southern Vermont and northern Berkshire County in Massachusetts, according to the Weather Service.
The Weather Service in Burlington, Vt., canceled its earlier winter weather advisories and ice storm warnings around the region on Sunday afternoon but warned that showers were expected through Monday evening “as a cold front pushes through.”
Livia Albeck-Ripka and Johnny Diaz contributed reporting.
