Peter Grogono

Ice Storm

Montreal, January, 1998

I had a late class on the evening of Monday, January 5, and I arrived home at about 10 p.m. in freezing rain.

Freezing rain happens when there is a temperature inversion. Falling snow melts a few hundred feet above the ground, falls as fine water droplets or wet snow, and freezes when it lands on something. Branches of trees and electric cables, amongst other things, accumulate ice. The effect can be quite beautiful, especially at night, as the branches and wires glisten in the light of the street lights.

The conditions for freezing rain are quite special, and usually it does not last more than a few hours. The unusual feature of the "ice storm" was that several inches of rain fell over a period of two or three days, and all of it froze.

I was contemplating breakfast on Tuesday morning when, at about 8:20, the power went off. Looking along the street, it was not hard to see why: the weight of the ice had brought down branches and wires and the street had been closed to traffic.

The damage to trees was particularly evident. There were fallen branches in almost every front yard. Some people had already tidied up the branches and moved them into piles in the street.

Looking down the street, you could see ice weighing down the branches. Passing cars had already created two ruts in the road. As the days passed, these ruts got deeper and deeper. They eventually reached a depth of about six inches. Cars with low clearance could not get down the street at all, and cars with higher clearance could not escape from them.

Ice on the branches of trees is nice to look at, but not very good for the tree.

Wires can be repaired, but trees cannot. It is not an exaggeration to say that almost every tree in Montreal and the surrounding countryside was damaged by the storm. This photo, taken close to my house, show a tree that has already been partially "repaired" - broken limbs have been sawn off cleanly, reducing the probability of disease.

This is another tree on an nearby street. The weight of the ice was enough to split the trunk.

The damage on the mountain for which Montreal ("Mount Royal") is named was so extensive that the park was closed for a while after the storm. This is a typical scene on the mountain in late February.

Here is another example of a thick branch split by the weight of ice on it.

More than a month after the storm, the city finally got around to clearing the ice from the streets in my neighbourhood. City workers used heavy bulldozers with caterpillar tracks to break up the ice, shaking the houses.

The ice is finally removed from the street in front of my house.

Our house had no power for eight days. On the sixth day, the temperature inside was a degree or so above freezing and I drained the plumbing system, including all the radiators. As it turned out, this was probably unnecessary, but better safe than sorry. Two radiators burst at a friend's house, and the mess was quite spectacular.

We were lucky: people in areas south of Montreal did not get power until mid-February.

Peter Grogono. 27 March 2001. Resources for this page are provided by the Department of Computer Science at Concordia University in Montreal.