Ontario's largest utility says at least 32,000 people across the province are currently without power as a wind storm continues to batter the region.
Hydro One says more than 156,000 people have lost electricity in the nearly 24 hours since the storm swept into the province, bringing significant wind gusts and even shifting ice from waterways onto the land.
Hydro One spokeswoman Alicia Sayers says that while the utility has restored power to nearly 130,000 customers, there are still hundreds of outages spanning from Windsor to the Ottawa area and as far north as Sudbury.
Environment Canada says the wind storm is starting to die down from peaks registered late Sunday and into Monday morning.
Spokesman Gerald Cheng says the agency recorded maximum wind gusts of 128 kilometres an hour in the Niagara region, where video footage shows wind blowing large chunks of ice from the Niagara River over a retaining wall and onto the road.
Cheng says that while windy conditions will still prevail across southern Ontario throughout the day, gusts will die down to closer to 60 kilometres an hour as the day continues.
"It is starting to abate, but we're not quite out of the woods," Cheng said in a telephone interview. "There's still blowing snow issues across a large swath of the province."
Cheng said areas around Lake Huron and Georgian Bay are most likely to be impacted by snowfall on Monday, adding the wind warnings that have been cancelled across most of the province are still in effect in that region.
Once the wind has died down, however, deep cold is expected to impact a larger area in the province.
Extreme cold alerts are expected for much of northern Ontario in the coming days, Cheng said.
Further south, cities like Toronto can expect temperatures to dip below -15 degrees Celsius with wind chill values making conditions feel colder, he said.
