The 1998 Ice Storm

Freezing Rain
The people of eastern Ontario and southern Quebec had just finished their Christmas and New Year's celebrations and were settling in for their winter routine when the new year quickly took a twist that no one had expected. During the very late evening of Sunday January 4, 1998, with the temperature around -8 C (16 F), it started to rain. Freezing rain is not uncommon in this part of Canada as it happens about 16 days per year. In most cases, the freezing rain lasts just a few hours as either a cold or warm front moves in and it changes to snow or rain. We didn't know it at first but this freezing was different. When we woke up the next morning, the weather conditions were very bad as the freezing rain and ice pellets had continued to come down all night long. And to our dismay, the freezing rain went on and on all day long. With temperatures varying between -9 C (14 F) and -2 C (28 F) the rain was freezing solidly bonding with trees, roofs, roadways, overhead power lines, sidewalks, cars, buses and everything you can think of. Luckily, I did not have to go out because I could not have. It was way too dangerous to walk in these "skating rink" conditions on the roads and sidewalks. After a full day of freezing rain with such intensity and the weather forecast for the following day predicting more of the same, it was starting to look as though this storm might be a repeat of the infamous 1961 Montreal Ice Storm which paralyzed Montreal for 3 days.
 

The Power Goes Off
Hydro Quebec, the province owned and run electric power generating body, has never been known for its reliability. Power failures happen regularly in this province. In comparison, Ben, who has lived in Ottawa for over 30 years, is seldom troubled by power interruptions. Ontario Hydro seems to be extremely robust, so much so, that Ben went well over 10 years without any failures. Not so in Quebec, a month without a failure seems to be a rarity. As power failures became more and more common around the Montreal region, scenes such as the cherry picker hydro crew shown in the demonstrative picture on the right became a common occurrence. As time went by, these crews literally became life savers. They worked non-stop day and night. 
 

Learning To Survive Without Electricity
The next day and the next day and the day after that, the freezing rain kept on coming and coming. Every so often, the freezing rain would stop but then hours later it would start again. Living on the third floor of an apartment building, the elevators stopped working immediately leaving only the stairwell to go up and down. The building had no emergency power. The emergency lights in the stairwell lasted only thirty minutes. So I was stuck on the third floor for the duration of the power failure. The elevator turned out to be a minor problem. The electric stove was totally useless. The apartment was heated electrically so as time went by it got colder and colder. After a week it was so cold that I slept in my bed wearing several layers of clothing including my winter coat and several pants. But beauty can be found among all this misery. The weight of the ice on the trees caused many trees to snap or bend down so deep that the branches touched the ground. Though very destructive, this accompanying photo shows that beauty can be found here.
Over time, almost all of the people in the building moved in with family or friends who were fortunate enough to still have electricity. I decided to stay put as I was deadly afraid to try and walk on the pure ice surface outside. There were five of us ladies, Terri, Annette, Rie, Rosita and I, who bonded together and helped each other to make the best of it. We had a camp stove that we used in front of an open window to make coffee and soup. During the day, we all huddled together in one apartment which would be warmer because of our body heat. Since it gets dark very early in Montreal at the beginning of January, we went through an awful lot of candles. Once, we were lucky, Jan Turkenburg brought us hot chicken dinner from Scores, my favourite chicken restaurant. Those people that wanted to leave had to overcome the challenge of putting sand on the slightly sloped long driveway and open the huge garage door by hand. One saving grace was that the telephone never went out. Ben often called to find out how I was doing. He was obviously concerned especially about the temperature in the apartment. Though Ben never lost power in the townhouse where he lived in Ottawa, at the office they did lose power for a few days.
By the time Saturday rolled around, the freezing rain had stopped. But we still had no power and no notion when we would get it back. Ben and his friend Gail decided to venture from Ottawa to see me to help out and to see for themselves how I was holding up. As the Ottawa to Montreal stretch was particularly hard hit, they left Ottawa with a full tank of gas as most gas stations were without power. They had quite the trip. There was almost nobody on the road and a few times had to drive over downed power cables. They saw many power line crews from Quebec and neighbouring U.S. states working to fix broken power lines and toppled hydro poles. The devastation was extra great around St Lazare where my niece Mary lives. Huge power line transmission towers toppled. I was very happy Ben and Gail came over. They went out to run some errands as the stores along St Jean had re-opened after their power was restored. They also picked up a hot meal for us, a Pizza Hut pizza. When they left, Ben said that very cold weather was forecasted in a few days and if the power wasn't restored by then come hell or high water, he wanted me to move to friends with power. He threatened to return from Ottawa and move me. I certainly did not want that. As it turned out, Ben was right and Monday night the temperature was to drop to minus 18 C (0 F) and with great difficulty Arnold v.d. Linden picked me and we literally shuffled down the icy path to his waiting car. I stayed with them for 1 night and the following morning we heard that power had been restored to our building. What a relief.
 

The Extend of the Destruction
The 1998 ice storm was rated by Environment Canada as the worst natural disaster of the 20th century. The following facts provided by Environment Canada bear witness to that:
  • at least 25 deaths, many from hypothermia.
  • about 900,000 households without power in Quebec; 100,000 in Ontario.
  • about 100,000 people took refuge in shelters
  •  millions of residents forced into mobile living, visiting family to
    shower and share a meal or moving in temporarily with a friend or into a
    shelter.
  • prolonged freezing rain brought down millions of trees, 120,000 km of
    power lines and telephone cables, 130 major transmission towers each
    worth $100,000 and about 30,000 wooden utility poles costing $3000 each.
The damage in eastern Ontario and southern Quebec was so severe that major rebuilding, not repairing, of the electrical grid had to be undertaken.
What it took human beings a half century to construct took nature a matter of hours to knock down.
Farmers were especially hard hit. Dairy and hog farmers were left without power, frantically sharing generators to run milking machines and to care for new-born piglets. Many Quebec maple syrup producers, who account for 70% of the world supply, were ruined with much of their sugar bush
permanently destroyed.
  
Once power was restored, for me life quickly returned to normal. But not so for many other people who in some cases went without power for weeks. What did frustrate me was that the apartment building next to us, an exact copy of ours, got their power back on days before we did. They are located on St Jean, a major thorough fare, and on another electrical grid. So they say. The ice storm was quite the ordeal for many people and monumental in the Canadian record books, for me personally, it was challenging but only a minor temporary hardship. My brother Ton and his wife Bep came over to stay with me for one night until their power was restored.
 
Webmaster note: Though in the past I've seen pictures of the five ladies during their ordeal, so far I have not been able to locate them.