At least six people were killed and more than 730,000 customers were without power in the Great Lakes region on Monday after a spring storm brought freezing rain and sleet over the weekend.
Three children — two siblings and a cousin — were killed after a tree struck their vehicle in Michigan on Sunday afternoon, the Kalamazoo County Sheriff’s Office said. The siblings were a 4-year-old boy and a 2-year-old girl. The cousin was an 11-year-old girl.
“At this time, it appears weather is the main contributing factor to this accident,” the office said. The identities of the children were not released.
On Sunday afternoon, severe crosswinds blew a tractor-trailer on its side, killing the driver, Jagbir Singh, 34, of Ontario, Canada, in Valparaiso, Ind., according to Sgt. Benjamin McFalls of the Porter County Sheriff’s Office.
The severe weather also caused an Amish buggy to overturn, killing its driver, Lonnie Yoder, 84, in Elkhart County, Ind., on Sunday afternoon, according to the Elkhart County Sheriff’s Office. And in Montgomery County, Ind., a tree that had blown onto a roadway caused a driver to swerve, resulting in a head-on collision that killed one driver, according to the Indiana Department of Homeland Security.
On Monday, the Mackinac Bridge in Michigan was closed on Monday because of hazardous ice conditions, the authorities said. There was no timetable for its reopening.
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.
In Ontario, images on social media showed downed and ice-encased trees, some of which were making roads impassable.
In Michigan, state officials activated the State Emergency Operations Center after the ice storm downed trees and power lines, making some roads impassable in the northern part of the state.
In eastern Canada, the authorities in Quebec on Monday morning warned of the possibility of “several hours of freezing rain” and snowfall until Tuesday morning.
This ice storm produced more ice than usual, said Harold Dippman, a meteorologist at the Weather Service office in Gaylord, Mich. A typical one in the region produces up to a quarter of an inch of ice.
The storm was also lasting longer than usual. Mr. Dippman said a typical one lasts six to 12 hours, while this one lasted multiple days.
In Michigan, about 300,000 customers were without power on Monday afternoon, according to the monitoring site poweroutage.us, with around 48,000 customers without power in neighboring Wisconsin, and more than 40,000 without power in Indiana.
In Ontario, more 340,000 customers were without power on Monday afternoon, according to poweroutage.com.
The outages, concentrated in central and eastern Ontario, were largely caused by ice that weighed down tree branches, Hydro One, Ontario’s main power transmission company, said on its website.
Livia Albeck-Ripka contributed reporting.
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