Guest blogger Raymond Murphy, author of Leadership in Disaster: Learning for a Future with Global Climate Change, reflects on the North American Ice Storm of 1998, fifteen years later.
This January is the anniversary of the 1998 ice storm, which remains fifteen years later the most expensive disaster in Canada’s history and affected the most people. It was also the worst disaster in the history of Maine. For some people, it resulted in only a candlelight dinner 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 seventeen in the United States. An inquiry referred to the disaster as “confronting the unforeseeable” because it was worse than the worst-case scenario that had been foreseen. For everyone it was a reminder, perhaps now forgotten, of how dependent we have become on the electrical grid and how vulnerable it is to extreme weather. There has been little media attention over those fifteen years to the most dangerous day when freezing rain crushed transmission towers and lines cutting off power for Montreal’s water filtration plants and pumps. Water had been stored in high reservoirs, so the supply continued to flow by gravity, but it was rapidly being depleted. The worst danger was fire. Live local electrical wires from the one remaining transmission line had fallen on trees and houses; generators would overheat without water to cool them; previously unused fireplaces and chimneys were being overused by people desperate for heat; and candles were pressed into service for light. Any of these could result in fire, but there would be insufficient water to extinguish it, and the fire could spread through the city, particularly if there was wind. San Francisco burned down in a three-day fire after the earthquake of 1906, in 2012 Hurricane Sandy caused major fires in New York City, and a similar fate threatened Montreal in 1998 during a period of heightened risk of fire but insufficient water to extinguish it. The geography of Montreal made the possibility of fire more perilous, as described by Hubert Thibault, chief of staff for Quebec Premier Lucien Bouchard: “the bridges were closed because of ice that was falling on the vehicles. That was a situation which was difficult to manage. Everyone was trapped: the population was trapped on the island of Montreal.” Thus Mr. Thibault concluded that “we were on the threshold of a catastrophe of great scope”. Mayor Pierre Bourque agreed that Montreal had a very close call and added that “people never really knew what had happened”. Leadership in Disaster: Learning for a Future with Global Climate Change presents insider information about what happened and investigates how leaders managed the crisis and what could be learned from their experience for extreme weather in the future when climate change threatens to make it more frequent and severe. The investigation does this through in-depth interviews with highly placed political and emergency management decision-makers in Quebec, Ontario, and Maine.
Raymond Murphy is emeritus professor and former chair of the deparment of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Ottawa and past president of the Environment and Society Research Committee of the International Sociological Association.