What happens at 00:00:01 on January 1? Try deadly, black, and very, very cold.
A heavy ice storm is the most double-edged of natural phenomena, embodying beauty and menace in equally astonishing proportions. The first response is usually awe: People find their muted winter world abruptly swollen, slippery, and silver-white, as if everything has been recast as a George Segal sculpture. Only gradually do they comprehend that their elegant surroundings are also treacherous.
At 3 a.m. on January 8, 1998, Mitch Teich was awakened by what sounded like rapid-fire rifle shots, and realized he was hearing tree branches snapping under the weight of ice. Teich, a radio reporter in Potsdam, New York, 20 miles from the Canadian border, noticed that the electricity in his house was out, and figured it might not come back on for a few hours. He pulled another blanket over himself and went back to sleep.
By the time Teich got up at 7, everything was covered in a thick sheet of ice. If not for fallen limbs and power lines, he could have skated across his front yard and down the street, all the way to work 10 miles away. Teich turned on his transistor radio and was surprised to hear that, except for a couple of French-language AM stations across the border, both bands were silent. He went outside to take in the spectacle, and found his neighbor doing the same. They agreed that the outage might last the whole day. Without hot water or electricity, Teich abandoned the thought of making breakfast. Instead, he chipped the ice off his car's windshield and - since downed power lines blocked his driveway - drove across his yard to get to work. As it turned out, he lacked power for eight days, so he didn't go back. Instead, he slept on foam insulation in his office.
Teich had it easy: Some of the 5.2 million people affected by the Great Ice Storm of 1998 went without power for five weeks. The storm struck a 600-mile-long swath of terrain that covered parts of four Canadian provinces and four US states, in many areas doubling or tripling records for freezing rainfall. It was the most destructive recorded weather event in Canada's history, and produced the highest insurance loss of any Canadian disaster. It generated 840,000 claims, the most of any episode in the annals of insurance, and 20 percent more than Hurricane Andrew, the costliest natural disaster in US history. In Canada alone, roughly 2.6 million people - a fifth of the national labor force - were prevented from getting to work for several days. About 100,000 people took refuge in shelters. The official death toll was 45 - 28 fatalities in Canada, 17 in the US - but those numbers understate the ice storm's effects. Hundreds of ill and elderly people, weakened by extended stays in shelters where flu became epidemic, died weeks or months later, succumbing to ailments they might otherwise have overcome.
Yet the storm's biggest impact was, in a sense, not weather-related: It was the loss of electricity, which continued long after the storm passed. Ice accumulations caused the collapse of more than a thousand 260-feet-high transmission towers, each weighing 20 to 50 tons, and at least 35,000 wooden utility poles in Canada. More than 7,500 transformers stopped working, often blowing out with dazzling orange-and-yellow flashes or bursts of flame. Montreal's water supply, reliant on electricity for filtration, came close to running dry. About 5,500 Canadian dairy farms lost the capacity to milk their cows mechanically, and even where cows could be milked by hand or with generator power, the milk often couldn't be delivered to production plants, as the roads were impassable. Some parts of Montérégie, a region of 1.3 million people southeast of Montreal, went without power for so long that the area became known as "the Dark Triangle."
More than a year after the storm ended, the people who experienced it remain aware of one overriding lesson: Their dependence on electricity makes them more vulnerable than they'd ever imagined. As Mark Abley wrote in The Ice Storm, a book of photographs published last year in Toronto: "Huddling in school gyms, church halls, shopping malls, and other shelters, the evacuees didn't pray for a return of fine weather. They prayed for a return of power. The ice storm demonstrated not that we are prisoners of brutal weather, but that we are all now hostages to electricity."
Whatever the Y2K crisis turns out to be, it is already unprecedented: We have never before anticipated the simultaneous breakdown of a significant fraction of the world's machinery. True, it's possible that nothing will happen, that at midnight on January 1, 2000, the only thing that will drop besides the Times Square ball will be the jaws of litigators and survivalist salesmen who counted on chaos to generate more business. Or maybe, just maybe, a lot of things - say, most things - will fall apart. Contrary to what the Social Security Administration has promised, pensioners in the US won't get their Social Security checks after all, but that won't matter much, because we won't have a financial system that knows what to do with checks.
The truth is likely to fall between these two extremes. We may not glide into the new millennium, but we won't be destroyed by it, either. Across the spectrum of Y2K mavens, from debunkers to doomsayers, a rare point of agreement is that the electricity system is at the core of the problem. One disturbing scenario is that Quebec-style outages will crop up all over the world, all at once: We will all find out that we're hostages to electricity.
This isn't just a fringe notion. Victor W. Porlier, a former chief of information-systems development for the US Agency for International Development (not exactly an extremist group) and the author of Y2K: An Action Plan to Protect Yourself, Your Family, Your Assets, and Your Community on January 1, 2000, calls the electrical system "the linchpin issue." Even the sober American Red Cross is advising citizens to prepare for an outage by stocking a week's worth of disaster supplies and keeping extra cash on hand in case ATMs don't work.
The idea of a sweeping blackout arises from the close relationship between electricity capacity and demand. If the Y2K bug forces a small fraction of utilities out of service, the thinking goes, then the result could be a cascading outage spreading over a wide area. Remedies are complicated by the fact that the Y2K error - the programming convention of indicating the year in two digits instead of four - isn't just written into software but is also encoded in many of the billion-plus computer chips in worldwide circulation. Such embedded systems perform critical functions in utility operations, including generation and delivery of power.
It makes sense, therefore, to assess the likelihood of a Y2K-induced breakdown in the power system, but even specialists in the field don't display much clarity on the topic. Senator Robert F. Bennett, a Republican from Utah, is considered the US Senate's Y2K expert. Don Meyer, Bennett's Y2K spokesperson, sounds confident when he declares, "The utility industry appears to be successfully dealing with its vulnerabilities" to the Y2K bug, but then he issues enough qualifications to cast that conclusion into doubt. His optimism, he concedes, is based on upbeat projections provided by the utilities themselves.
"That's akin to having elementary school kids grade their own tests," he admits. "Of course they're going to give themselves an A." A survey released in January by a utility umbrella group called the North American Electric Reliability Council shows that while 82 percent of critical utility components have been assessed for Y2K readiness, only 44 percent have been repaired and tested - the most time-consuming part of the process. If the utilities don't perform those chores by June 30, as they're supposed to, Meyer says, "then we might have bigger troubles than what the committee currently predicts we'll have." Finally, he says, while the United States may be able to ride out its Y2K problems, other countries almost certainly will face more severe consequences. Among the nations that he thinks "might just disappear off the technological map" are Afghanistan, Argentina (an oil exporter to the US), Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Russia, Somalia, and Thailand. What sounded at first like an upbeat assessment isn't so reassuring after all.
Rick Cowles, a leading utility-industry commentator and the author of Electric Utilities and Y2K, has a long list of worries about the utilities' response to the Y2K bug. For starters, he thinks that of the 7,300 power companies in the United States, about 15 percent are ahead of or on schedule with Y2K compliance, 15 percent are far behind, and the 70 percent in the middle exist in a gray area. In addition, power plants are starting to face shortages of Y2K-ready replacement parts, including embedded systems. As the year 2000 approaches, the shortage is likely to deepen. Fossil-fuel-fired generating plants, which provide 69 percent of the nation's energy supply, may run short of coal or oil if, as seems plausible, the transportation sector experiences its own Y2K problems. Cowles also believes that to preempt any possibility of nuclear catastrophe, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission may deactivate some of the nation's 103 operating nuclear reactors for failure to show Y2K compliance.
All this is likely to strain the power industry's capacity. The result, Cowles thinks, won't be a vast blackout on January 1, but rather brownouts and rolling blackouts that start in mid-January, perhaps building to a peak during the summer, when power demand is high and Y2K snafus have accumulated. The worst impact might be economic, with industry slowing down because of power rationing. Overall, it's a disturbing scenario, but not an apocalyptic one. Perhaps more to the point, it's nothing more than informed speculation, as Cowles himself hastens to stress.
In the end, we're left with our gut feelings, the rough sum of our level of trust in experts and institutions, our temperament, and perhaps the bent and vividness of our imagination. If, in its stunning lack of predictability, the Y2K bug gives rise to plausible but unverifiable scenarios, then perhaps we should try consulting the past: What really happens when the lights go out?
The Great Ice Storm produced the most vivid recent example of a regional outage, so it's worth a closer look. Whatever dislocation the Y2K bug causes may not precisely match it, but some elements seem likely to recur. Besides, as we head into an uncertain future, history is all we've got.
Like Mitch Teich, most people who experienced the ice storm understood its impact only gradually. Most other disasters - earthquakes, tornadoes, fires - strike suddenly, but the ice storm took a few days to reach a crescendo, and then its main effect, the outage, lingered for weeks. Coping with it thus required a marathoner's skills, not a sprinter's. The precipitation actually fell in three separate storms, which together dropped as much as 4 inches of freezing rain between January 4 and 10. Trevor Ferguson, a Canadian novelist, reported that after the first storm he weighed a downed pine twig. Encased in ice, needle by needle, it weighed 12 pounds; once the ice melted it weighed an ounce.
The first storm was mere prologue. Weather forecasters at Environment Canada suspected that more freezing rain was coming, and suggested that citizens "pray for plain rain." The blackouts began on the afternoon of Monday, January 5. On Tuesday morning, hundreds of thousands of people in Ontario and Quebec woke up without power. The worst day arrived with the third storm on Friday, January 9, when 3 million people in Quebec alone, nearly half the province's population, were without electricity. By then, the storm had severed four of Montreal's five electric power links, and most people in the city lacked power. The storm also shut down three Montreal bridges spanning the Saint Lawrence River. Officials worried that chunks of ice falling from the bridges' superstructures could strike cars and that the weight of the ice and cars together might make the bridges collapse. Downtown Montreal went dark. That day - Black Friday - the banner headline in the Montreal daily La Presse said, "It's Hell." More precisely, hell was frozen over.
People without power discovered just how many facets of their lives depended on electricity. Their stoves, appliances, and heating didn't work, and many telephones went out. In eastern Ontario, where 50,000 phones went dead, the electric utility, Ontario Hydro, was doubly confounded, since it depended on customers' phone calls to alert it to power failures. Throughout the affected region, all financial transactions had to be in cash, since credit card swipes and ATMs were useless. And even if drivers could find highways free of tree limbs and power lines, they could go only as far as the gas in their tanks would take them, because gasoline pumps didn't work.
Most disturbing of all, at 12:20 p.m. on the 9th, the two water filtration plants that served 1.5 million people in the Montreal region went down, leaving the area with a 4- to 8-hour water supply. In a decision that later drew criticism, government officials chose to delay telling the public, lest the news exacerbate the crisis by provoking water hoarding. The dilemma that officials faced - essentially a choice between the collective good and individual rights - recurs often in disasters, and is usually decided in favor of the collective, as it was in Montreal.
Even as officials deliberated, water pipes in some households were already dry. As reports and rumors of a water shortage spread, consumption jumped by 10 percent anyway, and bottled water disappeared from stores. Provincial officials considered evacuating Montreal, but dropped the idea after realizing that an evacuation order would probably create additional chaos. By 9:30 p.m., one of the city's major reservoirs was nearly empty. Montreal's fire chief, Alain Michaud, moved a demolition crane into the city - if a building caught fire, it might burn to the ground, but the crane would demolish neighboring structures to prevent the fire's spread. That option was never used, chiefly because that evening Hydro-Québec, the government-owned electric utility, managed to divert power from its sole functioning Montreal electricity link to the two filtration plants, reviving water service.
Electrical customers throughout the storm region discovered that they couldn't trust their utility's power-restoration forecasts. In a report on the ice storm commissioned by the Ottawa-Carleton regional municipality, disaster expert Joseph Scanlon later wrote that, "to say the least, Hydro's spokespersons were inept."
According to the report, the spokespeople repeatedly said that power would be restored in a region served by a given substation by a certain date, and customers assumed the statement applied to all the homes served by the substation. Instead, Ontario Hydro meant only that power to the substation itself would be restored; several more days might elapse before all the linked homes got power back. Ontario Hydro often plainly didn't know when power would be restored to individual customers, yet it made a pretense of providing that information daily.
After Ontario Hydro's chair remarked at a news conference that he himself was having trouble getting answers from his staff, "it was open season on Ontario Hydro," the report said. "If the company was blaming itself, it seemed reasonable that everyone else should do the same. Ontario Hydro personnel called that news conference 'the press conference from hell.'" It's likely that any outages caused by the Y2K bug would produce similar public-relations debacles, since utilities might not immediately know what line of computer code is causing the outages, let alone how long repairs would take.
Without power, many people discovered that their first source of support was not their government, but their neighbors, who banded together in homes with generator-powered heat or woodstoves. "On my street," Trevor Ferguson wrote in Unplugged, a photography book about the ice storm, "private property became community property. Need a tool? Help yourself at any hour, no need to knock. A single, small generator was located and moved around, dragged from home to home on a snow scoop. As more generators were found, people moved into the warmer houses, and all along we cared for the elderly and helped families with small children to evacuate. These scenes were endlessly repeated throughout the darkened landscape." In many cases neighbors got to know each other for the first time, and drew mutual satisfaction from their combined efforts.
This is typical of disasters: The force of nature or technology that causes the crisis is perceived as the enemy, and people join together to fight it. If a Y2K crisis occurs, such citizen participation would be crucial, because government agencies will be spread too thin. Steven Davis, a Montgomery County, Maryland, budget manager who has focused on Y2K issues since 1996, says, "We've determined that in any of the worst-case scenarios, we can't shelter and feed the masses if there are power outages or food shortages. People are going to need to take care of themselves."
A teamwork dynamic applies to the utilities themselves. During the ice storm, utilities faced a huge emergency rebuilding task, and received help from linesmen who traveled to the storm zone from as far away as Hawaii and British Columbia. Hydro-Québec had never before erected transmission towers in the middle of winter; this time it deployed 4,000 workers to do so, and in three weeks it purchased as many building materials as it normally buys in five years. While the Y2K bug alone probably won't cause much physical damage, the effort to restore power could require additional manpower. If many utilities are in trouble, the extra personnel won't be available. Each utility will have to rely on its own resources.
When government responded to the ice storm, it was usually at the lowest, most local level first. The chief exception was the Canadian army, which promptly dispatched nearly 16,000 troops - the largest peacetime military deployment in Canada's history - to clear roads and conduct house-to-house checks of residents. That turned out to be a very good thing, for in Quebec, the province-level public-security department was overtaken by the constantly increasing breadth and duration of the storm. Headquartered near Quebec City, outside the storm zone, it also suffered from its isolation.
"Every day we had to fight newly closed roads and increasing telecommunications problems," recalls department spokesperson Marc Lavallée. "We were trying at the same time to see ahead, to find out what was coming and how many people were affected, but the figures were changing so fast, we didn't know when or where it all would stop. We were short of beds and blankets, and we had a hard time making sure towns activated their emergency plans. We just couldn't cope with demand." The department didn't even begin to take substantive action until a week after the storm hit; by then, its staff had taken two days to relocate to Montreal.
A year later, Lavallée calls the ice storm "a wake-up call." He's not predicting any Y2K outages, but in case they occur, department officials have stored mattresses, blankets, hygiene kits, and 55,000 beds in warehouses in different parts of Quebec.
The ice storm laid bare many municipalities' lack of emergency preparations, and those towns that had made contingency plans discovered that they still depended on help from neighboring areas, which were just as incapacitated as they were. As a result, townspeople coped with the crisis by constantly improvising, just as they probably would in a major Y2K outage.
In Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, a working-class town of 36,000 people inside the Dark Triangle, the guiding principle was improvisation under pressure. The mayor there, Myroslaw Smereka, declared a local emergency on January 6, when 80 people took shelter in the gymnasium of the local public high school. By the next day, that number had grown to 150; the day after that, it swelled to 2,200. Smereka is a former economics professor with the mien of a younger, gentler Rod Steiger. Suddenly, without previous crisis management experience, he found himself responsible for a group of shelter inhabitants that eventually numbered 3,600 people, a tenth of the town's population.
The shelter's immediate needs were blankets, beds, candles, and medical supplies. Smereka sent police officers to find managers of the two local discount stores to order them to open their doors. Once inside, the mayor's aides bought all the blankets in stock. Meanwhile, Alain Beauchamp, board president of the public health service that served Saint-Jean, needed money for medical goods but lacked cash. Since electronic transactions were impossible, he called on a friend who owned Coq Rapide, a fast-food chicken emporium that was one of two Saint-Jean restaurants remaining open during the outage. Each day Beauchamp wrote a check to the owner for up to C$10,000 ($6,634), and the owner repaid him with the same amount in cash, drawn from the restaurant's daily take.
Inside the high school, Smereka and his staff assigned 600 evacuees to the gym and 20 evacuees to each classroom. Among them was an ample number of people - elderly, disabled, or mentally disturbed - who depended on government financial support and typically lived alone.
"These people think of their apartment as their stable reference point, and now all of this disappears," Smereka says. "You have young punks with spiked green hair and old people with bladder problems. You have husbands who beat their wives and aren't much nicer gentlemen in the shelter than they were at home, but they're sleeping next to people with psychiatric problems. After a few days, some couples have to have sex - in the middle of the shelter, they're going at it! At first the shelter is fun for the children, it's like camping, but after a week they get bored, and the parents don't know when it's going to be over.... My, my, what a package!"
The punks were immediate irritants. Despite the presence of a volunteer security force, they tried to steal unattended belongings. They forced children to give them objects they wanted, or else threatened to beat the kids up. At night they went out for beer and returned drunk and rowdy. Yet the mayor's problems were only beginning. While the high school's generator provided minimal lighting and heating, the inhabitants had to live without ventilation and hot water. As a result, no one bathed, and some people were not exactly dirt-free before the crisis began. Then, on the fifth day, the generator broke down, so the evacuees spent the night without heat. The lack of ventilation took its toll. On the sixth day, health authorities determined that the gym was on the verge of a gastroenteritis epidemic, and declared that it had to be emptied and cleaned.
A gym full of gastroenteritis sufferers was unthinkable: The sanitation problems alone would have been horrific. But the threat could not easily be eradicated, for unless the inhabitants got a shower and a change of clothes, scrubbing the room would have been futile. Smereka and his staff decided to round up enough soap, towels, and fresh clothing for the 600 people; then they'd serve them dinner in the cafeteria, take them to school showers, and transport them to a nearby vacated military college while volunteers cleaned the gym. At first, the plan seemed likely to work - the vice mayor had contacts in the apparel industry, which he used to get 600 sets of new clothes, and the Canadian army moved a generator to the military college - so Smereka announced it to the gym inhabitants.
Alas, 20 minutes later Smereka was informed that the military college lacked a suitable coupling device for the generator, so he regretfully told gym residents that the plan was canceled. Soon afterward, he learned that the generator problem was solved, and that volunteers had located 600 clean towels. Smereka announced that the plan was back on, but this time some gym inhabitants were skeptical. How, for example, were they to take showers? Smereka explained that the women would use facilities inside the school, while the men would walk through a corridor to showers at the school swimming pool. He didn't mention that he'd enlisted 60 Canadian soldiers to form a cordon to guide evacuees to the pool.
While the gym residents ate dinner, Smereka got word that the fresh clothes would arrive half an hour late - the plan would have to be delayed. Then came another call from the military college: The generator was working, but the room set aside for the evacuees was so big that it wouldn't be warm until the next morning. The plan was devolving into a perpetual good news/bad news joke. After dinner, Smereka, who himself was functioning on four hours of fitful sleep a night, made a final announcement. The gym inhabitants would take showers as planned, but afterward, instead of going to the military college, they'd return to the gym, which would be cleaned during their absence.
That was one change too many for some evacuees. About 40 resisted, and it wasn't just the punks - people of all types were upset by this perceived violation of individual rights. They said it was against the Quebec Charter of Human Rights, the region's equivalent of the US Bill of Rights, to force them to shower. In the midst of their declamations, the soldiers arrived, and the resisters grew even more agitated. "The last, last breath of decency left them at this point," Smereka says. "They started yelling, 'They're taking us to the showers, and they're separating the men from the women! They're handing us soap, and the military is involved! This is Auschwitz!'"
Smereka's first reaction was disbelief. It wasn't possible, he thought, that people were citing the Charter of Human Rights to avoid showers, when they'd spent the previous six days in the gym and knew the situation. "It's so strange," he recalled in his modest office nearly a year later. "You've never had to think or deal with something like that, and all of a sudden when you have to deal with it, you have only a few seconds to react." Smereka knew he'd have to live with his decision for the rest of his life. Then he instructed the soldiers to keep the recalcitrant group in one room while the other evacuees took their showers.
The showers proceeded, the gym was cleaned, and the next morning the freshly bathed evacuees moved to the military college. The resisters eventually took showers, too. As Smereka remembers, "After they took a shower, they felt good, but they said I had no right to force them!" The shelters stayed open until power was restored to all of Saint-Jean's residents, more than three weeks after the crisis began. (By then, many of the elderly and invalid shelter inhabitants liked their new communal life and were reluctant to go home.) The stress on Smereka didn't fully register until a few months later, when, at the age of 49, he suffered a heart attack. He recovered, and was elected to a second mayoral term last November.
One bit of Y2K conventional wisdom is that anyone facing surgery should avoid hospitals at the turn of the year. But if the experience of Charles LeMoyne Hospital during the ice storm is an example, the surgery would probably be successful, even as the hospital undergoes turmoil.
LeMoyne, a 500-bed teaching facility across the Saint Lawrence River from Montreal, is what its president calls the "admiral ship" of the region's 10-hospital fleet. Once the ice storm started, LeMoyne was suddenly receiving 100 ambulances a day instead of 35; walk-in patients doubled to 300. On the third day, LeMoyne lost electricity and began running on generators that provided 40 percent of the hospital's usual power supply.
Then came the water crisis, which inspired the staff to fill every basin, sink, and pail, in case the pipes went dry. The generators broke down on the sixth day, and the staff instantly switched to flashlights. For two hours until the generators were repaired, the hospital lost the use of its life-support and monitoring equipment: Nurses pumped air by hand into the lungs of patients on respirators and manually took each patient's pulse and blood pressure every 15 minutes. Instead of one nurse for each six patients, a ratio of at least one-to-one was needed. Throughout the outage, elective surgeries were canceled, but emergency operations nearly doubled, to 30 or 40 cases a day, without any evidence of increased risk to patients.
In the midst of all the dislocations, the hospital's 2,000 employees were fretful. They were not merely care providers but fellow victims, who were understandably worried about the well-being of their families and homes. Marcel Boucher, LeMoyne's medical director, won back their attention by inviting their families to move in with them: The hospital became a hotel. Family members slept in the auditorium, the gym, the cafeteria, and the hallways; rooms like the radiology lab, used only during the day, became nighttime dormitories. The cafeteria was open 24 hours a day, making stews, pastas, and pizzas. "Our chefs, who were usually putting out globs of inedible material, now were serving good food," Boucher says.
Morale soared. The crisis invigorated staff members: They liked the feeling of being tested to their limit, of serving the common good in an emergency. Ordinary conflicts fell away. "People were volunteering for everything," Boucher says. "If they weren't officially working, they stayed in the wards to give a hand." Even administrators felt appreciated: "Hospital personnel thought of administrators as a bunch of paper pushers, but when they saw us solving every problem and never leaving the hospital, they saw us as equals. I got standing ovations in every room I entered for a month after that."
Many more hospital stays were attributable to the outage than to the ice storm itself. The first wave of patients was entirely outage-related: victims of hypothermia, food poisoning, and carbon monoxide poisoning. The carbon monoxide victims arrived at the hospital up to 15 at a time after getting sick from a generator or barbecue that had been moved indoors for warmth. If someone in the basement of an apartment building - a "stupido," as Boucher put it - moved a generator indoors, everyone on the ground floor above got poisoned. The number of carbon monoxide victims dwindled after officials throughout the region spread word that generators belonged strictly outdoors.
Next came the orthopedic cases: people who'd broken their limbs and necks after slipping on the ice. The third wave was the flu epidemic.
"It was flu season, and if you put hundreds of people in shelters, one of them sneezed and 10 of them caught the flu," Boucher says. "Then the hospital personnel got the flu." Yet another wave started in February, when chronically ill people who'd spent extended periods in shelters began showing the effects. Finally, the staff itself grew exhausted. The crisis lent the hospital a new sense of purpose, but it was draining and disruptive. The place didn't fully return to normal for six months.
Y2K worriers, take note: In an outage, generators are precious. During the ice storm, they saved thousands of lives and businesses, and the effort to distribute, install, and fuel them was perhaps the most pivotal service that government performed. In Canton, New York, the Saint Lawrence County seat, county administrator Don Brining arrived at work at dawn on Thursday, January 8, to find that power was out in much of his largely rural county. He and other officials quickly declared an emergency. Brining, a retired US Air Force lieutenant colonel, tapped another man with a military background to head his generator team: Bill Murphy, an Army Reserve colonel and the chief clerk of the family court.
Murphy transformed his courthouse office (itself running on generators) into a generator-logistics center. He procured generators from federal and state agencies and private companies, while farmers outside the ice storm region loaned generators to farmers who'd lost power. Murphy's team also ran a phone bank so that people in critical need of generators could call in requests. LeBerge & Curtis, a farm-equipment business in Canton, became a farm-generator distribution point. Trucks bearing generators would typically arrive there in the middle of the night; then the generators would be unloaded with forklifts, tagged, and transported to their destinations. If generator recipients didn't know how to install them, Murphy sent volunteer electricians with the equipment.
Among the first priorities for generators was Mitch Teich's radio station, North Country Public Radio, the designated emergency broadcaster for an eight-county region. NCPR is located on the second floor of a medical building on the campus of Saint Lawrence University in Canton. Cut off from its regular National Public Radio feed, the station specialized in storm-related information. Since many listeners were using transistor radios running on a limited supply of batteries, it reserved five minutes before the end of each hour for public-service updates. Where had emergencies been declared? What roads were passable? At night, the station opened its lines to call-ins, and listeners exchanged information. "People designated a farm where you could bring firewood if you had extra or get it if you needed it," says news director Martha Foley. "Doctors would call in and say, 'I can't get to my office, but I'm at my house if anybody has a crisis.' Since some people had phone service and others didn't, we'd take messages from people saying, 'I just want my family to know I'm OK.'" One day, a 10-year-old boy named Nate told morning host Barb Heller Burns over the air, "My dad brought your dog home."
With Internet connections, television, and most radio stations down, NCPR became the region's information and entertainment hub. It held haiku and limerick contests, and invited listeners to submit lists of the 10 things they most liked and disliked about the ice storm. One typical entry: "With bad batteries in your radio, James Taylor sounds like James Brown."
Jon Greenwood, owner of one of the biggest dairy farms in Saint Lawrence County, says that if he had to choose between buying a generator or fire insurance, he'd take the generator, because it comes in handy more often. Greenwood speaks from experience.
During the ice storm, his 600-cow farm ran smoothly on two tractor-powered generators, while other dairy farms in the region had trouble milking, feeding, and watering their cows. Greenwood's major expense was diesel fuel: Whereas in a normal winter he uses only a few gallons of diesel, during the outage he was using 200 gallons a day.
Alan Knapp and his family were less fortunate. When power went out, their dairy in DeKalb Junction lost its capacity to milk and water its 53 producing cows. Cows thrive on a regular schedule: If they're used to being milked twice a day, they become traumatized if they're milked just once, and they can easily contract mastitis, a potentially fatal disease that renders their milk substandard. For four days, the Knapps were able to milk their cows once a day by rigging a vacuum hose to their tractor. Since their well pump didn't work without power, they led the cows across an ice-covered field to a brook, but four cows slipped and fell splayed across the ice - "splitting themselves," in dairyman's parlance - and had to be killed on the spot. Eleven other cows developed such severe mastitis that their milk became undrinkable, and the Knapps had no choice but to ship them for slaughter. When it became clear that the other cows would require at least a year to recover from mastitis, the Knapps were forced to sell them, too. It was not an easy separation, for the Knapps had treated the cows almost as pets, giving their children and grandchildren rides on them.
"A lot of them were older cows, and they'd worked really hard to support us," Knapp says. "It was like parting with our friends." For three months the Knapps worked at odd jobs. Then, in November, they started over, buying a modest new herd of 14 cows.
About the only people in the Canton area totally unaffected by the outage were a hundred Amish families, who may embody the ultimate Y2K remedy: choosing to live without electricity. While people all around them were busy staving off tragedy, the Amish continued sending their children to school and helped neighboring farmers milk cows. The Knapps gave their Amish friends 8,000 pounds of milk that couldn't be shipped, and the Amish fed it to their pigs and turned it into butter and cheese. In return, the Amish gave the Knapps bread, butter, cookies, a rocking chair, and other things. Eleven months after the ice storm, an Amish friend of the Knapps stood in his lantern-lit, woodstove-heated kitchen, surrounded by cheerful children baking pies and sewing quilts, and pronounced the event "nothing unusual." He was describing his experience, not boasting.
Another Amish friend, an upholsterer named Joe Hostetler, summed up the ice storm like this: "Modern conveniences turned into inconveniences. Our inconveniences remained mostly the same."
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