Remembering Canada's worst ice storm ever - Part 3: The Superheroes

in #history • 5 years ago

While it took some 10 000 people to reconstruct Quebec's destroyed electricity network (some 3400km of power lines, 1000 pylons, 17 000 wooden poles and 7000 transformers were brought down as a result of the unprecedented load of ice they had borne over 5-10 January 1998 - see the bottom of this post for a list of other posts on the topic), today I'd like to focus on the teams which handled the emergency situations during the storm and a couple of genuine heroes who may just have saved the City of Montreal from having to be evacuated.

Watch the video in this article

Even if you don't understand French (or you do understand French, but have never heard Québecois), I strongly recommend you watch the video in this link. I don't know how to extract the link from the article, but it will tell you far more what the emergency recovery effort entailed than the photos will. Fast forward to minute 1:08 if you want to see what the network failing looked like - in real time.

Some 16 000 soldiers deployed

As I mentioned yesterday, this was Canada's largest peacetime deployment of the army. Their mission: to open routes for emergency services.

According to this report, Brigadier General Gaston Côté had this to say:

« On avait acheté une centaine de scies à chaîne pour permettre aux soldats de couper les arbres et rétablir la circulation. Nos troupes de reconnaissance avaient comme mandat de cartographier tous les endroits où il n’y avait pas d’électricité, car Hydro-Québec n’était plus en mesure de le faire. Les lignes téléphoniques classiques étaient tombées. Les antennes cellulaires étaient encombrées de 6 cm à 10 cm de glace et n’étaient plus capables de transmettre le signal.»

Loosely translated, that says:

"We bought about a hundred chainsaws for the soldiers to cut trees and re-establish movement of vehicles. Our reconnaissance teams were given the job of mapping all the areas without power, since Hydro-Québec couldn't do it any more. Telephone lines were down. Cellular network antennas were covered in a layer of ice 6-10cm thick and could no longer transmit signals."

Ayoi.

But someone had to get the lines working again

At the height of the crisis, just one line supplied the whole island of Montreal.

According to this report, water treatment plants were without power, so there were only about two hours of potable water remaining. To this day, I've never heard of potable water availability being expressed in terms of hours. Equally terrifying for civil authorities was that there wasn't enough water pressure for firefighters to, well, fight a fire.

Hydro-Québec's leadership was desperate to staunch the cascade of emergencies and asked the military to try to break the layer of ice from one of the main supply lines by - get this - throwing logs from a helicopter onto the pylon. I don't know that much about flying a helicopter, but I know enough about physics to figure this must have been an extremely tricky manoeuvre.

The insanely brave guys to the rescue

Then, just like in the movies, two real life Bruce Willis characters and their faithful chopper pilot came to save the day and get more juice to the city.

Image source

Look carefully - you'll see humans standing on the platform, which is 107m above the ground - and above the icy St. Lawrence River.

Jean-Yves Boies and Alain Trottier, two linemen, stepped up to the task to reconnect the 120 kiloVolt (kV) Beauharnois-Aqueduc line. This could deliver an additional 200 megawatts (MW) to Montreal, adding 15% to the supply available the day before, and alleviating the load on the Boucherville substation line, the only one working the previous day.

The pilot, Yves Despois, managed to keep the helicopter within two metres of the pylon in the icy, windy, snowy, poor visibility conditions. There was no other way for the linemen to get to the platform since the pylon was covered in ice and it would have been too dangerous to climb. The team decided that rather than hang from the helicopter body, they would descend from the helicopter to the platform to do the reconnection work. This had never been done before.

But why am I telling you? Please just watch the video, especially around minutes 2:30, 3:15 and 4:00 (the latter so you can see how great the visibility was). I don't think language will be an issue as the images really speak for themselves.

#canada #naturaldisasters #heroes #teamsouthafrica
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