The next morning, the atmospheric dominoes began to fall. Rain fell continuously over eastern Ontario and southern Quebec for more than 24 hours, freezing as it reached the ground, where temperatures hovered a few degrees below zero. Sidewalks became encased in a layer of ice up to eight centimetres thick in places. Trees snapped under the weight. Hydro lines sagged, dragging wooden poles and steel pylons down with them and plunging some five million people across Ontario, Quebec and the northeastern United States into darkness. 

“These huge metal towers started to crumple,” recalls de Bellefeuille, who reported live from MétéoMédia’s Montreal studios throughout the storm. “Everybody was looking at the television going, ‘These things fall?’ We could not imagine.”

Across the city, people who still had electricity opened their homes to family and friends looking to take a shower or eat a hot meal. Others crowded into relief centres. Quebec declared a state of emergency and called in the military to help with the cleanup. It was the largest peacetime deployment in Canadian history. Tragically, 35 people died as a result of the storm, some from hypothermia, others from fires. Carbon monoxide poisoning proved fatal for a number of residents who were operating generators indoors. The total financial cost of the storm was estimated at $5.4 billion.