THUNDER BAY — Wednesday's dump of heavy, wet snow on in the Thunder Bay region continues to have a big impact on the electricity grid.
As of 10 a.m.Thursday, nearly 7,000 customers of Hydro One remained offline.
At 4:45 p.m., the utility still reported 134 separate outage locations, caused largely by trees that fell onto power lines.
Nearly 6,000 customers remained without service, and the estimated restoration time was midnight.
Hydro One was likely to update those times later in the evening.
The great majority of the outages were in the immediate rural Thunder Bay area, but there were others to the west and southwest of the city and the Kashabowie area as of late afternoon Thursday.
Hydro One spokesperson Alicia Sayers told TBnewswatch residents could check for updates on the website.
The utility has brought in extra crews from other parts of Ontario and is also receiving help from Synergy North.
Sayers said crews were still coming across additional instances of trees on lines, so it's difficult to predict when they will complete all the work.
Environment Canada said the storm brought widely-varying amounts of snow to the region.
"We got an assortment of things, depending on where you live," said meteorologist Gerald Cheng.
Closer to Lake Superior, he said the snowfall was less intense.
Only 12 centimetres of snow was recorded at Thunder Bay Airport, but in terms of total precipitation, including the snow that melted, there was 29 millimetres.
Just to the west of Thunder Bay, a resident measured over 25 cm of new snow as of 3 p.m. Wednesday.
Cheng said the Lakehead Region Conservation Authority measured 35 mm of precipitation as of 7 a.m. Thursday.
NOTE: This story has been updated with additional information provided by Hydro One at 11:30 a.m. Wednesday. It was updated again at 4:50 p.m. with current information about outages
