More than a cup of sugar

by Brandon Mayer

Last week, we witnessed what could possibly be described as the worst ice storm since 1998. That is not meant to suggest that the April 5 storm was as bad as the infamous Ice Storm of 1998, but it’s tough to think of any storms since then that have packed the same punch as last week’s storm.

Power was knocked out for hundreds of thousands of people in Ontario, some for many days. The Hydro One outage map showed a sea of dozens of outages across Eastern Ontario, even several days after the storm. When zoomed out, the outage map almost resembled a scatterplot. When zoomed in, huge outage areas became visible. Some people – myself included – only lost power days after the storm, which is evidence of the complexity of the damage done to the electricity transmission system. It would appear that in restoring hydro for some customers, it had to be temporarily knocked out for others. An early message posted by Hydro One celebrated 370,000 customers being reconnected within a couple of days after the storm. Considering the many still without power in the days that followed, and the fact that not all Eastern Ontario customers are served by Hydro One, I suspect the actual number of people that lost power from the storm was far higher.

For those who were safely nestled indoors and didn’t look outside, or those who were away on vacation during the storm, allow me to describe it. This was essentially a “thunderstorm that froze”. In my experience, thunderstorms in the summer come and go. You can hear the storm coming, it puts on a show, and then it crawls away. But for much of the day on April 5 – the early morning straight through to the late afternoon – lightning and thunder provided a steady reminder of the mayhem outside, even for those not looking out the window.

The rain from the storm was heavy. One reader from

Bishops Mills measured 67mm of rain – about 2.5 inches. However, only about 10mm of it stuck around as ice secretion, as opposed to the 50mm this reader measured during the Ice Storm of 1998. Warmer temperatures certainly prevented this storm from turning into a much more serious disaster.

School buses were unsurprisingly cancelled for students in the area on April 5, but they were cancelled again on April 6 due to continued hazardous roads conditions, probably due as much to fallen branches as it was to slippery roads. Some schools also had to be closed completely on April 6 due to a loss of power. Two consecutive school bus cancellation days in April is certainly something that we haven’t seen in a while.

Speaking of fallen branches and trees, declaring that they were “everywhere” in the days following the storm is not an exaggeration. One would have been hard pressed to drive a kilometre anywhere in the Municipality without seeing at least