The Storm

This is an account of the recent ice storm that is being hailed in the press as "the storm of the millennium."

It is now Saturday and as I look out of the window in my sunroom, I see that about 80% of the sky is blue! The thermometer outside the window reads -1 degree Celsius and the ice is falling everywhere off the limbs that are still attached to their respective tree trunks. Things are improving at last. But this is nearing the end of Day 4.

On Tuesday last, 6 January, 1998, in the afternoon, there was a warning broadcast of an impending ice storm. For those readers who have no idea what this means, let me digress very slightly to describe the differences between snow, freezing rain (the real nature of the ice storm), and freezing pellets (or hail or sleet). All of these conditions are quite unknown to those of you who have never encountered even snow outside of books or films. Essentially, snow leaves the clouds as white, six pointed crystals of frozen water; it can be "wet" (and very heavy - difficult to shovel!) or dry and fluffy (as shown on some Christmas cards. Freezing rain falls as rain but freezes when in lands making ice on whatever surface it falls upon. And freezing pellets are lumps of ice, sometimes called hailstones, that can be as fine as tiny peas in a pod or as large as one inch (2.5 cm.) in diameter, in which case they are distinctly dangerous and very destructive. They are rarely as destructive, however, as our freezing rain has proven to be.

Over Tuesday night, then, we had freezing rain. At about 0700, as were getting up, the power failed (for the first time) with loss of light (sunrise here at this time of year is about 0730), loss of radio, and most important, loss of heating. Because the heating in this part of the world is usually based on one of three devices (oil burning furnaces, natural gas burning furnaces, and electric elements - wood burning as an essential source of heat is very rare but not totally gone from the community), you might think that the first two of these three would continue in the absence of electricity. Alas, this is not the case as the real heating is done by burning fuel to heat either air or water and then pumping the warm air or water to all parts of the house; the pumps are driven by electricity. We use the raw electricity elements, as baseboard heaters, in each room of the house.

The lack of electricity was caused by two different by related problems: the breaking of overhead wires by accumulating ice on them; and the shorting out of transformers for one reason or another at local distribution stations. Sometimes these shorts are caused by overloads and sometimes by long icicles that reach across the gaps between conductors.

Wednesday morning saw us, then with no way of preparing our usual hot breakfast or the usual accompanying cup of coffee. We has a cold breakfast using the dawning light and one or two candles. Bob went to work and the dog and I stayed at home with the only resources being a tank full of hot water (better used now than be allowed to go cold inside the tank), a working telephone system that remained intact, for us, throughout the entire ordeal, and portable radios to keep track of the world around us.

As the day progressed, the house got colder and colder; Bob decided to come home earlier and we made preparations to go out for a hot dinner. Although the streets were very treacherous, with both walking and driving hazardous in the extreme, I managed to make it to the local store to buy a hot lunch and some necessary items, like salt to try to minimize the slipperiness of the driveway and walkway to the front door. By the time Bob got home, however, the power was again established, having been out for some eight hours.

But the worst was yet to come. During Wednesday night the freezing rain continued and we heard throughout the night loud snapping noises as limb after limb, being overly stressed by the added weight of ice, broke off trees. The grounds, on Thursday morning, seemed littered with wood, from twigs to major branches. The tops of trees had changed from being umbrella shaped canopies (when leafed in summer) to spikes. exposing bare white wood, pointing accusingly at the heavens. It was (and is) both stark and menacing.

More and more reports of people losing their power were coming in. During the night we too had lost power but only for about 1.5 hours, and we had a cooked breakfast on Thursday, thankfully, but worrying about others in Ottawa and the surrounding region who had much less good fortune than we. About 10 am on Thursday, the top local official declared the Ottawa Carleton Region to be in a State of Emergency (until, he said, noon on Saturday; it is now Saturday afternoon and this State of Emergency has been continued "indefinitely.") Bob, as the Chief of Human Resources at the Medical Research Council offices, was very concerned about whether the Government, and consequently his agency, was going to heed the call of the local official for people to be sent home, to stay off the streets, working at home if possible, and to be let off any penalty for not being at their jobs. Schools closed; banks closed; high technology companies closed; and finally the Government closed down, but only after some parts of it, Bob’s agency included, decided that they would be able to function on Friday morning.

By this time, the streets throughout the area were littered with branches - some totally impassable. More dangerously, there were live power lines down in some areas and the possibility of severe electric shock was being warned about. Danger tape was being strung all around the city as one form f hazard or another was identified and handled, while not immediately, as soon as the overtaxed workers could get to it. During Thursday afternoon Bob and I were at home bemoaning the loss of so much of our landscaping in the form of trees, shrubs, and bushes. Still more and more people were losing their electricity as the rain continued. Pictures started appearing of broken tall steel pylons - the towers that carry the high voltage transmission lines - and stories of some communities that were losing EVERY power pole feeding their towns. In a place called Vankleek Hill, about half way between Ottawa and Montreal, it was estimated that 2500 wooden poles were destroyed and still there is not power there.

In fact, Montreal, being about 160 km to the east of Ottawa, was more badly affected by the storm than was Ottawa. The city is on an island in the St. Lawrence river, and there are suburbs on the north and south shores as well as on another island to the north of Montreal island. The communities on the south shore were totally blacked out and at the height of the disaster, some 2.5 million people were without power. After some days of this, the separatist premier, Lucien Bouchard, finally agreed to help from the Canadian armed forces and has recently asked for a second contingent of 3000 men to help clean up the mess. Montreal is, as you may know, in Quebec province - the one that wants to separate from Canada. Two disasters now (the first was severe flooding last summer) will have been mitigated by efforts from the hated Canadians and their resources. It must have broken Bouchard’s heart to have to ask for help in this way. Confederation does have advantages!

At about 0545 on Friday morning, our power failed once more. During its "up" time, there were (and still are) frequent short interruptions; these, in the larger context, and in comparison with the total and unending deprivation of electricity experienced by so many people, are not serious at all except to the computer that really does not like to be turned off and on again in the space of a few seconds. The moral is to keep it off!

The Friday outage was about 4.5 hours in duration. The rain had stopped, but the weather forecasters said that another front of rain or possibly hail, was just to the west of us and due to strike at about 0830. We got the news in time, and went out for a hot breakfast before it struck. As Bob felt responsible for the proclamation about work on Friday, he went to his office to issue a continuation of the advice to stay home and keep out of the way of cleanup people on the streets. I let him off after breakfast and drove home just before the hail started to fall. As there was again a tankful of hot water, I decided that would take advantage of it as before. The windows were being struck by fairly small sized hail, and the telephone rang at that time. I forgot about the bathtub filling and it overflowed, showering the laundry room below. I got the water stopped in relatively short order, but it took the better part of an hour to pick up the water in the basement, move appliances and lift carpet to get at it where it had seeped, and then to wash and dry all the towels I had used in the exercise. There is, please remember, still no power in the house. After doing what he had to do at his office, Bob came home and the call to announce his departure from there coincided, to the minute, with the return of our power.

Friday afternoon was full of distraction as more limbs fell off trees. The hail soon changed to heavy snow and this added weight to the poor bent over branches. On our property, the two predominant forms of tree are maple and birch. The maple is more rigid and potentially more easily damaged. On the two biggest maples, in the front and back yards, the damage is about 30 loss of branches. The birches are much more supple - they bend so that the tips of the branches touch the ground. This exposes a large arc to the heavens (normally the arc is a vertical line and immune to ice and snow). I am constantly amazed at the capacity of the trees, made so much more vulnerable by this bending, to withstand such weight. It is certainly true that we have lost a number of branches, but there is every reason to believe that many more will not give way and return to their usual positions. As I look out my window I can see 3 birches and 4 maples (as well as 3 or 4 other trees, including one conifer which seems to fared the best). Each of the birches has some damage; the maples each have much more with large branches fallen away. There is a pile of broken branches in the back yard and it must be 8 feet (2.3 m) long and about 3 feet (1 metre) in diameter. And there are still many limbs not in the pile because they are hanging onto their trees by a thread.

Earlier in this episode, when the ground was totally covered by glare ice, the poor dog had a terrible time in the back yard. As early as Tuesday night and for about 48 hours afterwards, we had to let him out the front door: the back yard is terraced and he could slide easily enough downwards away from the house, but was unable to get back up or up the stairs to the deck at the back door. He became quite terrified and we were afraid he might explode. But he finally learned that he could go out the front where there is a small bit of shelter, and do what he wanted in the front garden with our blessing and not with scolding as had happened in the past.

Today, Saturday, the ice is covered with snow. The dog can manage the backyard again, and the high temperatures mean that the ice is falling off the trees. This is both a blessing and a curse: it is a blessing as the trees can once more attempt to stretch upwards as is their wont, but it is very very dangerous to be outside. I have found a place for the dog to run around, free from the danger of falling ice: it is the baseball diamond in the neighbourhood park. It is fenced in, with 5 openings. If the dog moves to exit the enclosed area, he gets yelled at and returns. The warnings on the radio are all aimed at people taking extreme caution about walking under trees, wires, and anything else that might have broken from the weight of ice but remains a menace as it shed this same ice.

Well there you have it. It continues to snow and night is falling as I write these last lines. The temperature is going to plummet tonight to -14 Celsius, and there will likely be more snow tomorrow. Bob intends to go skiing and I will stay home, I hope in a warm brightly lighted house. It has been an experience like no other in my life, and the people who keep records say that it is the worst recorded ice storm in Canadian history.