[rotifer]

I expect we mostly agree, but I disagree with your use of "ever". :-)

From the "January 1998 North American ice storm" Wikipedia article [1]:

    The area south of Montreal [...] was nicknamed the triangle noir ("dark or black triangle") [...] for the total lack of electricity for weeks.
    
    [...]
    
    In Quebec alone, 150,000 people were without electricity as of January 28.

(The storm started about Jan. 4.) The Montreal area is not prone to common natural disasters.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_1998_North_American_ic...

[doubled112]

Some Ottawa residents have been without power since May 21.

After the storm whipped through, I believe over 170K customers were without power.

That's not a time line I'd ever have considered possible in a major city in May.

Worst it's ever been, supposedly. Topped the 1998 ice storm and the tornado in 2018 for number of people in the dark.

[HWR_14]

That was 4 million people in an event that was so rare that it's the standout example of the last 40 years. The majority of people in North America seem unlikely to experience such an outage.