About 320,000 electricity customers in Michigan, Wisconsin and Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, were without power early 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.
More than a million people in parts of Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Vermont and Wisconsin were under an ice storm warning early Sunday. Up to an inch of ice was forecast to accumulate in some places,
Officials urged residents in parts of southern Michigan not to travel. They also warned drivers to be cautious on the Mackinac Bridge, which connects Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to the southern part of the state, because of icy conditions and the possibility of falling icicles.
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, but so far there have been reports of half an inch to three-quarters of an inch of accumulation.
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, over 117,000 customers were without power early Sunday, according to the monitoring site poweroutage.us. It said that around 24,000 customers were without power in neighboring Wisconsin.
In Ontario, about 179,000 customers were without power early Sunday, according to Hydro One, Ontario’s main power transmission company. The outages, concentrated in central and eastern Ontario, were largely caused by ice that weighed down tree branches, the company said on its website.
Hydro One said power had already been restored to over 116,000 customers.
