Hundreds of thousands in Quebec without power again due to storms, forest fires

As tornado alerts including a water tornado sounded off in several regionsof southern Quebec, nearly 500,000 Hydro-Qubec customers lost power on Thursday.

Earlier in the day, Hydro-Qubec said the outages were caused by forest fires in the James Bay region in northern Quebec, whichtriggered grid protection mechanisms.

Hundreds of thousands of customers are still without power and the utility now says the majority of the lingering outages are due to the storms that battered the greater Montreal area.

As of 6:15 p.m., there were still more than 360,000 customers in the province without power. The vast majority of the outages are in Montreal, Laval and the Montrgie region.

Over 53,000customers in theLanaudireregion are without power.

The mass outages comeexactly one week after the triggering of anotherprotection mechanism knocked out the power for about200,000 Hydro-Qubec customers in Montreal.