Nearly 300,000 students around Montreal returned to classes Monday for the first time since a crippling ice storm hit the region two weeks ago.
“It wasn’t a holiday,” said Evelyne Brien, an 11th grader at Paul-Gerin-Lajoie High School.
“From day to day, we didn’t know if we were going to have classes. There also wasn’t any electricity, so there was nothing to do.”
Though Montreal schools were back in business, about 95,000 students in the so-called Blackout Triangle south and east of the city face another week without classes because of power outages.
About 210,000 households in Quebec, most of them in the Blackout Triangle, were still without electricity.
In Montreal, businesses were getting back to normal but were asked to open only between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. That restriction was to be lifted Tuesday.
