Gojohnnygo.

So what was the worst thing about it?

Was it the being with out power?

Was it the cold that got to you?

Did you go nuts because you had no tv?

This could be fun!

Gojohnnygo.

FRANKVILLE Henk Schapelhouman is getting quite a workout these days.
For the past week, the 34-year-old has spent hours in his basement, pedalling a bicycle and wearing a Walkman tuned to CFJR.
What's unusual about his cycling is that Schapelhouman isn't trying to get fit. He's keeping his wife Heather and three young children warm as they wait for hydro crews to restore power to their Lake Eloida Road home.
The family heats its home with a combination wood/oil-burning furnace in the basement. While the wood part of the furnace can still operate during the blackout, the fan, which circulates heat throughout the one-storey house, cannot.
At first, Schapelhouman kept the fan running by manually turning the fan motor pulley using a tent pole. While it worked, it was slow going because the pole kept falling out of place.
"I thought to myself, `There's got to be a better way than this," remembers Schapelhouman, a tool and die maker who works at Gananoque Steel Forging.
With little else to think about, he tried several different solutions before devising an ingenious method to power the fan by rigging a 10-speed bike to the wheel.

Gojohnnygo.

Lots of ice!

BenyBen

wow good idea, pedaling for heat!

The ice storm for me was not really terrible. I spent most of my time playing games on my computer, since we had power for the whole time. I was very fortunate, because I was on the only street that had power in my neighboorhood for some odd reason.

The worse thing for me was that I couldn't go outside much, without risking to fall all the time. What would I give to go back to this time and put some screws in my bike tires and go around the eerily empty streets of montreal, with the ppl seeing a bike zooming past!

dobber

I happened to have made the cardinal sin of leaving the night before on a buisness trip. I remember, or more to the point my wife reminds me, that my parting words were "Honey it's gonna be kinda slick tomorrow, I'd prefer it you didn't go out visiting". She left hours after I did and wound up sheltered at a friends house where I found her four days later.



My most vivid memory of the whole thing is standing out on the back porch and the absolute stillness. No noises, no movement, nothing. As though the world had ceased to exist.

naisme

Man, I'm glad all we get here is snow, sure there is an "ice" base sometimes, but that's usually the first snow of the year, and then it's snow, snow, snow. That ice stuff, man... I was in KC once when it iced like that, trees and power lines were down, a couple days without power, boy, what a nightmare.

Gojohnnygo.

Don't count your chickens before they hatch! This type of ice storm could easily impact your area. I hope not!

gcasillo

February 2003. Man what an ordeal that was. A lot of neighborhoods here have power lines that run along the back side of property lines. Through trees. Lots of trees.

Man, it was a natural disaster of the first order. A year and a half later, the electricity line that comes off the pole and to my apartment building still snakes through a walnut tree. With the rain we had this year, everything was overgrown too.

Suffice to say, political candidates that emphasize basic infrastructure rate high on my list. In other words, none of the local ones...

Mtn Mike

In northern Virginia where I grew up, I distinctly remember the winter of '98 as the one with the least severe weather...no snow and no ice. We just got rain that year! . How boring is that? I like severe weather, so I'm glad I live in a colder climate now.

halfbiked

Did you live up here in about 95? There was a heavy rain sometime in mid December that turned into a freezing rain. Wasn't as bad as the storm others are posting about, but some frozen intersections in uptown didn't thaw until March or so.

CommuterKat

Hmmm... the worst thing might have been the live power line crackling on my front lawn..
Or maybe it was the tree that froze all bent over and encased my car with icy branches so that I had to squeeze in through the passenger side back door, and gun it in reverse as the tree crashed down on my hood
Or maybe it was realizing that after you light about 20 candles for warmth and light that maybe you should have bought *unscented* ones!

One of the more interesting things was standing in my front yard (safely away from the live power line) listening to all of the transformers blowing around the city, combined with all of the tree branches breaking to make it sound like I lived in a war-zone.

Definitely a memorable experience that I don't wish to repeat!

Kat

Wulfheir

That's hilarious!

Gojohnnygo.

Definitely a more memorable event. I also don't wish to repeat such an event.

I do remember the transformer blowing out at the end of the driveway. I was outside breaking ice off the shed door, then BANG OH CRAP! All I could see was a pinkish glow that faded to blue for 4 or 5 seconds. I almost crapped my pants.

vtjim

Wow. What brought this up?

We lived in a pocket of Vermont (Westford for the locals) that didn't see much of anything. It rained and we lost a bunch of snow. It wasn't until we went out to look around in our car that we realized something Very Bad had happened. We didn't lose power, telephone, or anything.

The area between Burlington and Montreal looked like someone had run through with a giant lawn mower...

CommuterKat

*jealous*

Turbonium

it was GREAT!!! we didn't have school for a week!! but my skiing season suffered.

Gojohnnygo.

What brought this up? We were talking about it in another thread. (we hijacked it) So I decided to start a thread about the ice storm 98.

Gojohnnygo.

More like the trees were snapped off by Godzilla. Thats all I could hear for two days was snap, crack and crash for 2 1/2 days. It took my brother and I another two days to cut are way out of a 1/4 mile dead end road. Just to find nobody had even started to look for us.

Gojohnnygo.

A link and a good overview. https://www.cnn.com/WEATHER/9801/10/ice.storm/

vtjim

Tell me about it. We went up to Smuggler's Notch (closest place to us at the time) and it was like skiing on cement. That was the first and only time we went back for a ticket refund. (If you return within an hour, you get your money back. Or that used to be policy, anyway.)