Nearly 600,000 electricity customers in Michigan, Wisconsin and Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, were without power on Sunday as a spring storm brought freezing rain and sleet to the Great Lakes region.
Ice from the storm covered tree branches, snapping some power lines on Saturday, and created hazardous driving conditions.
A National Weather Service office in Michigan posted photos on social media of trees weighed down with icicles. Accumulations of ice there ranged from half an inch to nearly an inch, the Weather Service said.
More than a million people in parts of Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Vermont and Wisconsin were under an ice storm warning late Sunday morning through the evening.
Officials urged residents in parts of southern Michigan not to travel. They also warned drivers to be cautious on the Mackinac Bridge, which connects Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to the southern part of the state, because of icy conditions and the possibility of falling icicles.
In eastern Canada, the authorities in Quebec warned of freezing rain and nearly half an inch of ice on Sunday, according to Environment Canada.
This ice storm is producing more ice than usual, said Harold Dippman, a meteorologist at the Weather Service office in Gaylord, Mich. A typical one in the region produces one-tenth to a quarter of an inch of ice.
The storm is also lasting longer than usual. A typical one lasts six to 12 hours, Mr. Dippman said, but this storm started on Saturday evening and could last until Sunday night.
In Michigan, more than 143,000 customers were without power on Sunday, according to the monitoring site poweroutage.us. It said that around 62,500 customers were without power in neighboring Wisconsin.
In Ontario, about 393,000 customers were without power on Sunday afternoon, according to poweroutage.com. The outages, concentrated in central and eastern Ontario, were largely caused by ice that weighed down tree branches, Hydrone One, Ontario’s main power transmission company said on its website.
Hydro One said power had already been restored to over 257,000 customers.
In the Northeast, temperatures will continue to rise on Sunday, putting an end to an icing threat in the southern and western Adirondacks, Upper Hudson Valley, southern Vermont and northern Berkshire County in Massachusetts, according to the Weather Service.
The Weather Service in Burlington, Vt., canceled its earlier winter weather advisories and ice storm warnings around the region on Sunday afternoon but warned that showers were expected through Monday evening “as a cold front pushes through.”
Johnny Diaz contributed reporting.
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