Quebec’s electric utility says it still can’t say with certainty when power will return to all the homes and businesses affected by last week’s ice storm.

About 16,000 customers are still off the grid, and Hydro-Québec says the majority of them are in the Montreal area.

Utility spokesman Francis Labbé says work is particularly complicated in areas where mature trees have damaged power lines and need to be removed before crews can conduct repairs.

Hydro-Québec says it has restored power to 99 per cent of the 1.1 million customers who lost electricity after freezing rain sent trees crashing onto power lines last Wednesday.

Labbé says it’s difficult to estimate when the remaining clients will be reconnected because each outage requires hours of work that only brings a small number of customers back on the grid at a time.

He says about 1,500 people, including Hydro-Québec employees and contractors, are on the job.