How the Ice Storm of '98 affected our family..

Accompanied by some pictures taken from The Montreal Gazette..
Well.. I'm back at work. Things are more or less back to normal.. It was a brutal storm which hit. I guess you read about it in the news and all over there (lots of coverage, according to what my Mom tells me!)

Christiane's parents lost their power in St.Bruno as of Monday of last week. (That'd be January 5th). In light of that, her mom and Mrs. Menard (who helped out with the wedding) ended up coming over to our place for Wednesday night. We were happy to have them, seeing as we had full power and Jonathan was pretty happy to see them too! (playmates!).

On Thursday I went to Eicon - but as conditions deteriorated I came home early (1:30pm). Thursday night I called my staff and told them to NOT come to work for Friday. We still had power at the duplex, however. Christiane spoke with the person who's renting the basement and found out that our house is on the same circuit as the hospital down the road, hence I was pretty confident that we would either keep our power through the whole situation or at least have it restored quickly if we lost it so that the hospital could continue their operations. BAD IDEA #1!!

The backup plan was that we would go to Eicon and stay there -- I Figured that power to the company would either be maintained or the generators would kick in and we'd at least have a warm place to stay. BAD IDEA #2.

...But that plan fell through the floor when we lost our power on Friday and found that Eicon had also suffered the same fate.

So...Friday night we spent at our house still. (Christiane, myself, Jonathan, Christiane's mom, and Mrs. Menard). On Saturday we moved out and headed over to Jean-Louis' place on the north shore. (That's in the area known as Laval).

Christiane's mom was also rather worried since Michel (Christiane's dad) was in St.Louis all week, and it looked like all flights to and from Dorval airport were being cancelled! He called on Friday night and announced that he was not going to be there on time. We were to pick him up at the airport on Saturday at 1:00pm.

When we went out to their car on Saturday we found that it was firmly entrenched in the ice. our driveway was blocked by the people who were staying at the lower apartment -- so we couldn't take our car out of the garage. Finally Michel ended up taking a taxi from the airport to our place (whew!) when he safely arrived on Saturday.

Saturday night we dug out their car from the ice so that we were at least mobile with two vehicles. Good thing!!

We had to move out of our duplex for a short period of time and stay with Christiane's brother Jean-Louis north of the Montreal island in a city called Laval. Jean-Louis and his fiance Guylaine were kind to offer us a place to stay on such short notice, it's a good thing that they had power! The situation was a trifle messy since nobody was all that thrilled to have a crying baby in the house. (*to say the least - can't say I blame them!*)

Jonathan was NOT happy to be in a strange environment, and he is very glad to be back home now. Last night he slept from 9h30 until after I left for work this morning (6h45) which gave both Chris and I a nice break. The last few nights he's only slept for about 30 minutes at a time, and it was rather rough.

The storm knocked out power for Christiane's parents more thoroughly -- they won't be getting their power back for 2 weeks it looks like. Michel (Chris' dad) is going to be flying back to St.Louis to continue his work for IBM, but her mom is going to be staying with us for the next little while until she gets power back.

The temperature today is about -20 or so, but during the "heat" of the crisis it was up around 0, so there wasn't a lot of damage caused by freezing pipes. (Our neighbour, however, kept his garage door open and lost all his house's heat and hence had broken pipes!) Our place went down to about 5 or 6 degrees, but it was still manageable.

They opened up shelters all around during the storm. Evidently it was more than a little bit stressful in the shelters - we saw some of the footage on the television about it and people were downright stressed out. I'm very thankful to Jean-Louis and Guylaine that they were able to offer us a place to go to - I would have hated to go to a shelter with Jonathan and all..

Listening to the storm status updates on the radio was very unnerving to say the least. To simply know the SCOPE of the damage was amazing. The estimates were always around 1,000,000 SUBSCRIBERS out of power. When you consider that some of the newscasts got it mixed up and reported that as "1 million people" that's a misconception. A subscriber to Hydro Quebec is a single house. With an average of 2.2 children per household, that means that there were about 4.2 million people out of power!! (that's two adults and 2.2 children per household, right!)

The roads were amazing. Deep ruts were cut into the ground by all the traffic, and cars were perpetually getting stuck. On Saturday when we dug Christiane's parents out of the ice so that we could all drive to Jean-Louis' place, we helped 3 other cars get unstuck as well. Our neighbour from across the street joked "Another satisfied customer by the Rathwell cornerstore!". (Since all our neighbours were all pitching in to help people there was a real community spirit going on..)

(From Wedding Pictures) Bill says: "That's it!"

The net result of this whole fiasco is the following resolutions: 
a) have a good supply of fondue fluid (or alternative cooking means!)
b) always have a good supply of spare batteries
c) have a good appreciation for the CBC radio -- their coverage of 
   the event and support was essential.
d) always have a backup plan to your backup plan.  
e) Always make sure that your laptop has a full charge!
f) Carry a pager so that people can always get in touch with you
g) Put family first over work in situations of emergency. No point 
   in going to work if the entire house hold is in a mess due to 
   the storm! Just the emotional support is enough to make it 
   bearable.
NOTE: The pictures on this page were "cribbed" from the Montreal Gazette's fantastic website located at http://www.montrealgazette.com
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