Canada

Residents of Pimicikamak Cree Nation are celebrating and relieved now that power and electricity are being restored to the community.

Manitoba Hydro has repaired a broken line that caused a widespread outage. On Thursday, it began restoring power to homes in stages, nearly four days after the downed line left community members without heat in freezing winter temperatures and prompted a state of emergency.

On Sunday night, lights went dark and heaters went cold in the northern Manitoba First Nation, located about 530 kilometres north of Winnipeg, when a power line that crosses the Nelson River snapped.

“It was –30 with the wind chill here," Grand Elder Raymond Robinson said of the situation earlier in the week before power was restored. "When I go to these homes, when they're breathing you just see that mist coming out of people's mouths because they didn't have [any] heating system."