Opinion: Lessons of the 1998 ice storm

Raymond Murphy, Special to the Gazette 


MONTREAL — This month marks the 15th anniversary of the 1998 ice storm, which remains the most expensive disaster in Canada’s history and the one that affected the most people. It was also the worst disaster in the history of the state of Maine.

For some people, it resulted merely in candlelight dinners of cold cuts. But for 300,000 people, it meant shivering in the dark for almost a month — in the coldest, darkest part of winter. Thirty people died in Canada and another 17 in the United States.

There were many lessons to be learned, but learning lessons from disasters is like learning foreign languages: for learning to stick, what you learn has to be put into practice. Many of the lessons learned from the 1998 ice storm were technical in nature, and have indeed been incorporated into subsequent physical infrastructure planning. But other lessons were broadly based social ones.

The freezing rain demonstrated how dependent we have become on our electrical grid, and how vulnerable it is to the overwhelming power of extreme weather. Whereas modern farms were devastated, Amish farms in northern New York State that refused to be connected to the grid were hardly affected at all. This apparently natural disaster, then, was in fact a technological calamity. There may have been intense freezing rain a century ago, but there was likely no disaster on account of it.

Overall, the responses of senior public officials during the 1998 ice storm reflected best practices up until then, including transparent communication to the population. Openness was, however, replaced by the withholding of information during the most perilous moment of the crisis, a fact that has received very little media attention.

The most perilous moment came when freezing rain crushed transmission lines cutting off power to Montreal’s water filtration plants.

Bridges were closed, so everyone was trapped on the island of Montreal as water stored in high reservoirs was rapidly being depleted. At the same time, fireplaces not made for heavy use were being overused, live local electrical wires from the one remaining transmission line feeding Montreal had fallen on houses, generators were overheating and candles were increasingly being pressed into service to provide lighting.

San Francisco burned down after the 1906 earthquake — and a similar fate threatened Montreal during the ice storm. Despite the strong risk, the population was not informed about the looming water shortage (not even the mayors of municipalities supplied with water by Montreal), for fear that people would panic and fill their bathtubs.

Several emergency leaders have since concluded that it would have been better to mandate a trusted spokesperson, like Premier Lucien Bouchard, to provide full disclosure about the impending shortage and solicit the population’s cooperation in conserving water in order to lengthen the time available to Hydro-Québec to find a technical solution. Giant generators brought in failed to restart the filtration plants, so the one remaining transmission line was shifted from downtown to those plants. The shift worked. Up until that moment, Montreal was lucky that there was little wind, and that rumours did not spread.

The main subsequent technical investigation into the ice storm was titled Confronting the Unforeseeable. Confronting the unforeseeable requires putting aside hubris, as well as our assumptions that timely technological solutions can always be found. Nevertheless, the subsequent collective capacity to bounce back was impressive.

Extrapolations from the past when it comes to weather can no longer be relied upon because we increasingly have an additional layer of climate change now being caused by human activities. Climatologists have concluded that the accumulation of long-lasting carbon in the atmosphere through fossil-fuel combustion increases the risk of more frequent and more intense extreme weather.

However, climatologists do not make the claim that the 1998 ice storm was caused by climate change, because freezing rain is difficult to predict and it occurred early on the carbon-accumulation curve. It was more a foretaste than a result. Like seismologists, climatologists can confirm cause-and-effect connections, but they cannot predict the exact location, timing, and force of specific consequences.


