Storm Warning Gambling With the Climate of Our Planet

It was dubbed "Beauty and the Beast." The blanket of ice, several centimeters thick, certainly gave the trees, roads, bridges, and buildings a winter-wonderland quality. But beneath the beautiful exterior lurked a beast without mercy, one that brought much of the northeastern part of North America to its knees for several weeks and strained the social and technological resources of the most advanced industrial society in the world to a shocking degree. On Monday, January 5, 1998, a huge mass of warm air laden with moisture barreled up from the Gulf of Mexico, causing severe flooding along the U.S. east coast, and slammed into a shallow layer of cold air hunkered down in teh Ottawa and St. Lawrence valleys. Unable to displace the dense, cold mass, the warm air climbed on top and, as it cooled, dumped copious amounts of water into the frigid air below. With temperatures hovering around 0C -- warmer than usual for the time of year -- the result was freezing rain and lots of it. Because the cold air mass was shallow, the water didn't have time to make it all the way to snow; instead it became supercooled droplets that froze on contact with every exposed surface, creating layer after layer of a very tough, adhesive glaze. As Environment Canada senior climatologist David Phillips put it, "This is the hardest kind of ice -- you can only break it with a hammer." It would have been bad enough if the storm had simply dumped its moisture and moved on, which is the typical pattern for such weather events in Canada. But the large weather system that caused it persisted, dropping rain in three waves over five days. On Tuesday night, Ottawa's weather forecast was ominous: "A series of disturbances is approaching ... bringing episodes of freezing rain, one after the other. By Thursday morning, 15 to 20 millimeters of freezing rain is expected to have fallen. Thursday into Friday remains to be seen -- pray for plain rain." Unfortunately, "plain rain" was not in the cards; Thursday night into Friday brought yet another wave of the frozen stuff. By week's end, the Ottawa and Montreal regions got a total of about 80 hours of rain, far in excess of the 45 to 65 hours they typically get in a whole year. An estimated 70 to 110 millimeters fell in parts of eastern Ontario and southern Quebec -- possibly more in some parts of the "black triangle," an area south of Montreal that suffered massive power losses. Ultimately, the region got about two years' worth of freezing rain in five days. It was roughly two to three times worse than the worst ice storms of the past, which had dropped about 25 to 35 millimeters of rain. Several factors influence the severity of ice storms, including the amount of precipitation that falls, the duration of the event, and the extent of the area affected. This storm would have been extreme by any of these measures, but all of them together made it catastrophic. By Saturday, when the rain finally stopped, an enormous region stretching from the middle of Ontario to southern Quebec, east to the Atlantic provinces and south into the New England states had been coated with a deadly glaze measuring up to 9 centimeters thick in the worst-hit locations. This was more than double the thickness of ice deposited in the worst previous ice storms in 1986 and 1961. Trees snapped under the strain, showering the ground with broken branches and wrist-thick shards of ice, the sound echoing through the streets like volleys of gunshots. Power lines, looped like icy garlands on a Christmas tree, hung to the ground until, burdened beyond bearing, they too snapped and tumbled into the snow, hissing and crackling with energy that had nowhere to go. It didn't take long for the crackling to stop, though, as utility poles and transmission towers began to crack and topple, littering the bleak winter landscape with piles of frDotto, Lydia is the author of 'Storm Warning Gambling With the Climate of Our Planet' with ISBN 9780385257909 and ISBN 0385257902.