Remembering Canada's worst ice storm ever - January 1998 - Part 2
Yesterday I shared with you how Canada's worst ice storm ever started, and my own small part in it, mercifully leaving it behind as I was busy moving to South Africa as 100mm of ice was busy taking down much of the province of Quebec's electrical network and its economy along with it.
A few facts and figures
About 100 000 people had to leave their homes to find shelter.
As for the province's power system, over 3000km of network was impacted, 1000 pylons crumpled, 30 000 wood poles fell and 7000 transformers blew.
Affected area
The affected area extended from southern Ontario (around Kitchener) to the coasts of the Bay of Fundy in the provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, more than 1000km.
Impact on people
At the height of the crisis, 3.5 million Quebecers (that was about half the province's population at the time) were without power. More than a million people in Ontario and thousands in New Brunswick were also without power...for several weeks.
In winter. When it's cold, and you need heat, and the days are short so you need lighting for many more hours a day than in summer, and the petrol pumps won't pump without juice to power them, and emergency services need power, and the wastewater treatment plants can't run without an electricity supply. And when, as it turned out, there wasn't enough wood in the province for people to burn in fireplaces or wood stoves to keep warm. (I haven't been able to find a reference for that last point yet, but I recall reading about that being one of the improvement measures implemented so people could weather emergencies which lasted longer than 72 hours.)
Can you imagine, close to 5 million people without power for weeks on end in winter.
Some people couldn't get to work for days or even weeks. I'll do a separate post on how amazingly people came together in that time of shared crisis as it's a story worth telling on its own.
16 000 Canadian army personnel were deployed to chop fallen trees, clear roads, convince elderly shut-ins to leave their dangerous gas-heated homes for safety and to get the province's infrastructure functional again. This was, and remains, the biggest peacetime deployment in history.
Despite the herculean efforts of the army and emergency services personnel, 35 people died as a result of the storm, and almost 1000 were injured. Some died of carbon monoxide poisoning as a result of trying to heat their homes with gas barbecues, some from hypothermia as they couldn't heat their homes or get to safety, some died in fires, and some from trauma (which I understood at the time being fatally injured through falls or being hit by falling debris).
A quick point on "falling debris"
At the time, one of my friends was keeping me abreast of the news by e-mail since the news services in South Africa carried none of these stories. He was living in an apartment building across from the apartment building I had just moved out of, and both of us had been on the "hospital lines" - meaning our electricity supply was secure even under the worst of conditions because the network was underground and hospital supply was prioritised. He had a couple of days without power but nothing significant, so I blithely assumed he would just head back to work downtown, a short, usually pleasant walk downhill on wide sidewalks between medium to tall office buildings and older heritage buildings.
"Downtown?!?" he said. "Not a chance. I'm too young to die." The wind had whipped up, and ice sheets which had accumulated on the roofs of buildings were being blown down to street level. Shades of The Omen!
We had often joked that it would help to have a sail to cross some of Montreal's windier intersections (to this day I have no idea how little old ladies do it in one traffic light against the wind), and Montrealers are a hardy, winter-savvy breed, but this told me just how serious the situation was.
Economic impact
The impact on the Canadian economy has been estimated at somewhere between one and three billion dollars. According to Radio Canada:
There were also some 600,000 insurance claims totaling over a billion dollars. Another billion was spent on Hydro infrastructure repairs, another billion on provincial government costs, and millions of dollars in expense incurred by the federal government and military.
An insurance report had a starker take on the numbers:
Nearly 800,000 insurance claims were filed in Canada with another 140,000 in the United States, causing
a total insured loss at the time of US$1.3 billion across both countries. The event also triggered a class action
lawsuit against a group of Canadian insurers for additional living expenses (ALE) due to evacuation as a result
of power outages.
Surely the authorities were prepared for this?
The so-called "ice storm" was actually a series of three to five successive storms between the 5th and the 10th of January 1998. Previous ice storms in 1961 and 1986 had led Hydro-Québec, the electricity utility, to reinforce its network far beyond the accepted Canadian standard of being able to withstand 13mm of ice accumulation, to what they thought was an highly conservative thickness of 45mm.
But of course, nobody had engineered the tree branches. They were the first to go. Some of them fell on overhead power lines in the medium voltage network, taking down that part of the network, including the transformers.
Then the unthinkable happened.
The province's high voltage network collapsed.
Over the next few days, I'll share with you some of the remarkable recovery efforts as well as a few stories "from the ground", as people came together to help each other in their worst time of crisis.
References
http://www.hydroquebec.com/ice-storm-1998/a-perfect-storm.html
https://forms2.rms.com/rs/729-DJX-565/images/wtr_1998_ice_storm_10_retrospective.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_1998_North_American_ice_storm
https://canadaalive.wordpress.com/2013/12/27/snapshot-ice-storm-98/
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/ice-storm-1998-1.4469977
https://ici.radio-canada.ca/actualite/semaineverte/ColorSection/environnement/030105/bilan.shtml
http://www.rcinet.ca/en/2017/01/05/canada-history-jan-5-1998-the-deadly-ice-storm-of-the-century/
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