Schools closed, hundreds without power after freezing rain in the Maritimes

It’s an extra long Easter weekend for some students in the Maritimes. Snow, ice pellets, and freezing rain caused many schools in the region to close or delay opening Thursday.

All schools in Nova Scotia’s Lunenburg County are closed as well as schools in Antigonish Town and County and Guysborough County. Most other schools were delayed opening.

Many school buses in New Brunswick were running on a one-hour delay. Petitcodiac Regional School in Petitcodiac, N.B., is closed following an early-morning fire.

All schools on Prince Edward Island were delayed opening an hour.

WEATHER WARNINGS

All freezing rain warnings were lifted across the region by the afternoon.

POWER OUTAGES

As of 9 a.m., there were nine unplanned outages in New Brunswick affecting 279 NB Power customers. By 1:30 p.m. that number went down to eight outages affecting 80 customers.

In Nova Scotia, there were 32 outages affecting 585 Nova Scotia Power customers at 9 a.m. The largest outage was in the Truro area affecting more than 300 customers.

By the afternoon, that number changed to 15 outages affecting 530 customers. At that time, the largest outage was in the Coldbrook area affecting 505 customers. The estimated time for restoration in that area is 11 p.m. Thursday.

Meanwhile, there were only two outages in P.E.I. Thursday morning affecting Maritime Electric customers in Northam and Baie-Egmont. By Thursday afternoon there were still only two outages, though they were in the Charlottetown and Beach Point areas.

TRAVEL

Halifax Stanfield International Airport advises travellers that Thursday's weather may cause flight delays or cancellations.