Fires, storms leave hundreds of thousands of Quebecers without power

Hundreds of thousands of Quebecers were in the dark Thursday afternoon as forest fires and extreme weather cause blackouts across the province. 

Three high-voltage transmission lines were rendered unavailable by fires in the James Bay region, according to Hydro-Quebec. Those interruptions led to the "vast majority" of outages in Montreal, Laval, and in the Monteregie region. 

At its height, more than 500,000 Hydro-Quebec clients had lost electricity.

The largest amount of affected residents was in Montreal. By the evening, the forest fires' impact had been resolved, but there remained just under 300,000 households without power. 

Reached by CTV News at 11 p.m., Hydro-Quebec said it was too soon to say when all the downed lines would be restored. 

"We have over 13 hundred physical places where our teams need to go and asses what happened, whats going on, and then they will see how much time it will take to restore power and start work," said spokesperson Caroline Des Rosiers.

"Our teams have been working all afternoon in difficult conditions. We have about 100 teams that are going to be working on the urgent cases in the night and more teams that will pick it up in the morning," she added. 

For a live outages map, click here to see updates from Hydro-Quebec.

Environment Canada has issued severe weather warnings in several areas of Quebec, including in Montreal, posing risks of additional power outages. 

Ongoing updates on the storm warnings are available on Environment Canada's website. CTV's continued coverage of the storms can be found here.