Ice Storm Twenty-Five Years Later

We don’t seem to bounce back from ice storms any quicker than we did before, although, true, I did not hear of any hydro towers crumpling this time.

You would like to think that each time these storms happen, Hydro Quebec is diligently taking steps to make certain the extent of future outages will be significantly reduced.

I get the feeling Hydro much prefers to let it happen, counting on powerless clients to muddle through as best they can, whether the temperature is -2, -25, or +35. It’s a thermal crapshoot. This time we lucked out, with a temperature mild enough that heat wasn’t the desperately vital issue it could have been in the dead of winter.

 

Our ice storms typically happen in early January. I really thought we had made it through this winter without a major ice storm. Yes, there were several instances of mild wet weather during the day followed by freezing conditions overnight that made the following mornings, tricky. I spread pet-friendly salt on our back deck and stairs a few times this past winter to make sure our doodles didn’t risk their limbs when we let them out the morning after wet surfaces had frozen overnight.

 

I was just flipping through the book published by The Gazette after the terrible January 1998 ice storm, when power was out for 33 days in some areas of Quebec. That things were not that bad this time is more a tribute to Mother Nature than Hydro-Quebec. Twenty-five years later, I have zero confidence that Hydro customers are any more likely to have power, or lose it, in our next ice storm.

 

This time, we lost power for 40 hours and, as frustrating as we found that, I cannot imagine being one of the households that lost electricity for six days! 

It was strange during the outage to go off to the grocery store where there was power and a slew of employees packing shelves with food. Everything seemed normal while you were filling your cart and then you’d leave and pull into your driveway and remember, oh yeah.

 

It was the same when we ate at Harvey’s restaurant in Laval at the height of the outage. It was certainly busier than usual, but everything seemed normal until we rolled back into our driveway and remembered, oh yeah.

 

Thank-you to whomever invented the toilet, James Jonathan Toilet perhaps, for not making them electric.

 

Hydro should be making a far greater effort to reduce the extent of future ice storm outages while improving grid resilience, a term that, as far as I know, I just made up. In that area, it would be nice to see a surge.