Service has resumed on the Montreal metro after all four lines screeched to a halt Wednesday afternoon.

The orange line was the last to resume service at 6 p.m., after an outage that began at 4:39 p.m. The green, blue and yellow lines were up sooner.

The metro system was evacuated following the blackout.

LaRonde amusement park was also without power on some of its attractions, and officials said emergency measures were put in place as some people were forced to be extracted by firefighters from the rides after they came to a halt.

Officials confirmed passengers were safely removed from all the rides, though some remained on the rides for several hours before they were manually removed. No injuries were reported.

Power was restored at the amusement park at 6:30 p.m., but people were asked to leave the park anyhow, so inspections could be carried out on all the equipment.

There are also reports of downtown buildings without power, including the Stock Exchange Tower at Square Victoria and the UQAM building on President-Kennedy, which was evacuated.

Hydro Quebec reports the cause of the problem was the intense smoke from the forest fires in the north of Quebec crossing some Hydro lines.

The safety mechanism that protects the lines in the James Bay area shut the power down as a precaution.

Only a few residential clients were affected.

Hydro Quebec is working to restore power.

Most of the equipment will reset automatically once it senses that it is safe to restore power.

As of 5 p.m., 900 clients were still affected by the outage.


Do you have any pictures or video from LaRonde? Send us an email at cfcfassignment@ctv.ca

CTV viewers sent us the following photos of the outage via Twitter: