Montreal’s first major snowfall of the season chokes morning rush hour

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The city’s first snowfall was expected to slow morning rush hour traffic to a crawl on Monday after the Montreal area woke to find itself under close to 25 centimetres of snow. An additional centimetre of snow is expected to fall every hour until skies partially clear Monday night.

Most of southern Quebec remains under snowfall warnings Monday morning.

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As of 8 a.m., Transport Quebec reported that all Montreal-area highways are partially or completely snow-covered and urged caution on what for many motorists is the first day of winter driving for the season. By 8 a.m. driving was particularly slow on north-south thoroughfares including Highways 15 and 13. Traffic on highways accessing the island of Montreal from the west in Vaudreuil-Dorion and from Repentigny in the east also slowed to a crawl.

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Winter tires have been mandatory on all vehicles since Dec. 1.

Hydro-Québec, which has been dogged by power disruptions because of weather, reported at 8 a.m. that more than 88,000 clients were without electricity, most of them in the Montérégie region (44,067 customers) and Eastern Townships (28,938 customers). There were 8,915 customers without power on the island of Montreal.

Vanguard School in St-Laurent is closed Monday. Other schools that have declared snow days are Joliette elementary and high schools, Rawdon Elementary and École Marie-Anne. Royal Vale has cancelled classes because of a heating issue.

Multiple flights out of Montreal-Trudeau airport scheduled for early Monday were either delayed or cancelled and travellers are advised to confirm their flight departure before heading to the airport.

Temperatures, while expected to be mild Monday, will begin to drop over the course of Tuesday, plummeting from Monday’s daytime high of 0 degrees Celsius to minus-11 C by 6 p.m. Tuesday.

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