(Bloomberg) -- An ice storm that battered parts of Ontario and Quebec Wednesday afternoon has left more than 1.3 million homes and businesses without power, closed hundreds of schools and choked Montreal’s streets with fallen branches.

Montreal, which had about 25 millimeters (1 inch) of freezing rain, was the most affected, with nearly 500,000 customers without electricity, according to Hydro-Quebec. The streets of Canada’s second-largest city are littered with downed trees and branches, while about a thousand utility workers are trying to restore power after transmission lines snapped under the weight of ice and fallen branches.

“This is a crisis,” Quebec’s economy and energy minister, Pierre Fitzgibbon, said in a news conference. “Montreal is devastated right now.”

Extreme weather has become more common as the planet warms. One of the region’s worst ice storms was in January 1998, when as much as 10 centimeters of freezing rain fell, toppling transmission towers and utility poles and leaving more than 1.6 million people in Quebec and Ontario in the dark. Another ice storm that swept through parts of the US Midwest and Canada in 2013 left many without heat and electricity through Christmas.

Some Hydro-Quebec customers will likely be without power on Friday and into the weekend, the state-owned utility said in a Twitter post, adding that a third of customers could potentially get electricity restored within the next 24 hours.

High winds, lightning strikes and freezing rain damaged equipment in neighboring Ontario, Hydro One said in a Twitter post, causing outages for 129,000 customers. In Canada’s capital, utility Hydro Ottawa said it had about 65,000 customers without power due to the freezing rain as of 8 a.m. local time.

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