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March/April 1998 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor's Notebook Feature: Ice storm Feature: Sandbanks Provincial Park Our home and native tongue Write to know À la carte

It was a spectacle of nature's prerogative, an unprecedented combination of meteorological forces acting to levy an extraordinary burden of ice on a landscape accustomed to icy burdens. Persisting for six days over vast tracts of open farmland, conifer-cloaked hillsides, suburban and urban grids, this amorphous pocket of precipitation was dubbed hyperbolically "The Storm of the Millennium." It was, indisputably, the storm of the century.

It provoked a range of reactions and a call to action, created dangerous situations, caused injury and death, and made heroes. It left more than three million people in Eastern Canada and the northeastern United States blacked out, cold, isolated and fearful.

Despair, determination, victimization, dependence, gratitude, ingenuity, achievement, self-reliance, fatigue, compassion, conservation, patience — these were the emotional sinews that bound people together. Aggression, selfishness, greed, for the most part, hibernated.

The rains came, unseasonably, from the deep south, a probable influence of El Niño, that periodic disruption of Pacific Ocean currents. The warm, wet weather reached the St. Lawrence River Valley late on Sunday, January 4, and encountered an east-west front of southbound cold, dry air from northern Quebec. A stalemate ensued, with warm air above and cool air below — a textbook formula for freezing rain: snow from the upper reaches of the warm air turned to rain as it fell, the rain was super-cooled as it fell through the cold air below and froze as it hit cold surfaces. An atmospheric Zamboni, the storm flooded a rink greater than the Great Lakes with more than 80 millimetres of ice rain over six days. A frozen strata thick as pavement covered the country.

Collapse. Tracts of green ash and cedar, white pine and willow splintered violently under loads 30 times their own weight. Waist-thick limbs on century-old heirlooms snapped and snagged wires on city avenues. Poles down outnumbered those still up in some areas. Transmission towers crumpled like exhausted marathon runners near Saint-Hyacinthe, Que., and Cornwall, Ont.

Unfamiliar sounds and sights occurred each day: the glassy crashing of ice falling from trees distant and near; the unceasing rumble of generators reverberating across the countryside; the convoys of hydro, military and phone crews on roadsides like liberation forces; the utter darkness.

The heroes: the Hydro-Québec linemen who risked all by dangling from a helicopter to refit a high-tension cable to a tower; the broadcasters on CBC Radio One who unhaltingly fed the airwaves with reports on damage, repairs, relief and weather; the neighbours who hauled generators house-to-house pumping sumps; the soldiers who carried seniors from frigid residences to shelters; the countless volunteers who fed, bedded and comforted the homeless thousands.

The villains: the man who went to Home Depot for a generator and left with a chain-cutter to obtain one by stealth; the thieves who took generators from houses while people slept, from telephone switchboxes, from railway crossings; the price-gougers.

The victims: 25 who died in Quebec and Ontario in a two-week aftermath, including Roland Parent of Sainte-Angélique, Que., who died of carbon-monoxide poisoning; Ernest Jubien and Ethel Cockell-Jubien of Mont-Royal, Que., who died in a fire caused by a candle; Margaret Heath of Pierrefonds, Que., who died of hypothermia; Noella Cliche of Saint-Martin, Que., who died after being crushed by ice.

The toll was immeasurable. The single-minded Financial Post estimated damage at $500 million and losses from interrupted production at billions. Dairy farmers, apple growers and sugarbush owners struggled to quantify their losses. Speculation swirled about hydro-electric rate increases as the utilities poured manpower and matériel into the fray. Property owners and municipal workers alike braced for a marathon of pruning.

Everyone had defining moments to recall, heart-rending or humanitarian. The view through my window at 6 a.m. on January 8 was an icon of the rural disaster zone. The hydro pole leaned at a 70-degree angle and the ice-encased wires dangled to the ground. Every tree, and there are hundreds, was snapped at the crown, cracked at major limbs or bent over with tips frozen into the shining ground. A 12-metre green ash, the focal point of our front yard, lay cloven down the trunk. Half had fallen toward the road, the other half onto the front deck. That tree was not much taller than I am when Robyn, my wife, and I moved out here to Mountain Township, Ont., in 1987. Now it's gone.

Our 12-day trial by firelight was not life-threatening, but was surely a reminder of the fragility of our nordic existence, of my addiction to electronic gadgetry, and of the labour required to live like a settler.

By the last week of January, some 300 customers in Ontario and 45,000 in Quebec were still powerless. Doug Thompson, mayor of Osgoode Township, Ont., promised not to lift his state of emergency until power was restored to every last house. By February, the ice storm was, in most newscasts, relegated to the end, an afterthought, as newer news — presidential scandals and weak dollars — took the lead.

One prevailing sentiment echoed across the land: a certainty that things will never be the same. Like many, we vowed we will consume less energy and be less reliant on one source. We will be more sociable with neighbours and strangers. And we will be acutely aware that we are as susceptible as the people of the Saguenay, the Red River or anywhere else to the destructive power of nature.

Eric Harris is managing editor of Canadian Geographic.

See also:

GeoMap: Bayou storm in a Canadian winter

Forest fallout: The damage to trees

Feast and famine: How did the animals fare?

Storm tally: A compilation of ice storm facts

Darkness on the edge of town: How one person learned from the storm of the century

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