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Where were you when the lights went out?
Jan. 14th, 2013 02:44 pmFifteen years ago today, I was still on an extended and unexpected holiday from work: the result of the great Eastern Ontario and Western Quebec ice storm that had struck a week earlier.
On Thursday, January 8, 1998, I had gone in to work at Place du Portage as usual. It was an uneventful journey in, but then around 9:15 AM, the computers shut off, the regular lights went out, and some emergency lights came on. There was no electricity in the building. After about 40 minutes, we were told to go home and that we would be informed via the media as to when to come back to work again.
A coworker drove me and a few other people home. By the time I got there, my street had also lost power. But we got off lightly. By the next day, our electricity was restored, the lights were back on, and the furnace was bravely thrumming away.
Our house was heated by an aging oil furnace (since updated), although the starter relied on electricity. But we also had a woodstove that allowed us to keep reasonably warm as well as heat up food and make coffee. In fact, we were just in the process of making ourselves some coffee when the lights all came on!
But meanwhile, on the Quebec side, my office building was to remain closed for another week. It was a great chance to get caught up on a few things around the house, to do a bit of leisure reading - and to go toaster-shopping!
I could do an entire blog on toasters. The first toaster we had provided yeoman service for over twenty years. Then it broke, and we bought a new one. The new one lasted about two weeks. So we got a new new one. And after that, yet another. We were forced to the realization that they just didn't make toasters the way they used to. So once we were no longer housebound, we headed for Sears Carlingwood and found a toaster that offered a guarantee - for a dollar or two extra, if the toaster malfunctioned within a number of years (I think maybe three or five), it would be replaced with no questions asked. I've always rather sneered at this cash-cow extended warranty business but given our recent track record with toasters, we decided to give it a try. And fifteen years later, although that toaster doesn't reliably pop up by itself, it still toasts the bread perfectly well - and not over-well, as long as you keep an eye on it!
Some of the trees on our property sustained serious damage - but trees, after all, are replaceable. We got someone to haul away the fallen branches. We eventually got rid of the trees themselves and did NOT replace them - mainly because a few years of dry spells later, they were sucking the moisture from beneath our house and our house was sinking. I'm relieved that we got them removed before the tree-huggers came along and insisted on permits for tree removal even on private property. Not that I don't have treehugging propensities myself - it's just that everything in life is a bit of a balancing act and my balance isn't good enough that I'm willing to live in the trees full-time and watch the house sink down into oblivion!
I didn't know it yet, but 1998 was to be quite an eventful year for me. I was to get a home computer for the first time, one which like the toaster, is still serving me well nearly fifteen years later. On the work front, I would work on the ill-fated UCS (Universal Classification Standard). And after twelve years working over in Hull, I would move in September to a new job with a sister department in downtown Ottawa. I hadn't worked downtown since 1981, having been at Confederation Heights between 1981 and 1986.
What really struck me after not having worked downtown for all those years was the huge upsurge in the number of homeless and/or street-people. During the 1970s, the panhandlers you saw downtown were often of the weekend hippie variety, and quite often those folks were offering something like dope or subterranean newspapers in exchange for cash! The people I encountered now really did seem to be down and out. Clearly the recessions of the 1980s and 90s had taken their toll.
Also in 1998, I noticed that Algonquin College was advertising for librarians to teach part-time in their library technician programme. I answered the ad and ended up teaching evening courses for the next two years - 1999 and 2000. I turned down a request to teach a course in the summer of 2001 (by which time I was busy coming to grips with a very demanding new full-time job) and after that, they never called me back. However, I did in my new job host a couple of Algonquin technician students doing internships.
I recently dug out a book by Mark Abley, "Stories from the Ice Storm". Abley is also the author of a book called "Spoken Here", a collection of essays about endangered languages, which I started reading in Chapters one day and found enthralling enough to buy and read from cover to cover. Anyway, the stories from the Ice Storm book is one that I picked up from one of those formerly ubiquitous publishers' overstock sales that have become increasingly scarce during the past decade or so of e- and i-books. It brought back a lot of memories of what some folk were going through during the storm - and of how fortunate we were to have escaped more or less unscathed.
There's talk now, with all the government cutbacks, of the army starting to charge municipalities who ask them to intervene in the case of natural or extraordinary disasters like the ice storm - although they seem to be backtracking a bit on that idea. The energy infrastructure also seems a little different (though not necessarily better) from how it was fifteen years ago. For example, we now have time-of-use billing for electricity to reduce demand during peak periods. As well, there actually seem to be periods of time (perhaps not harnessable) when some districts actually have to PAY nearby ones to take energy OFF their hands! Is it primarily a political thing? Do we over-encourage people to use certain kinds of energy (solar, wind, etc.) at the expense of others that might make more sense? I don't know, and I think that will have to be a topic for another day.
On Thursday, January 8, 1998, I had gone in to work at Place du Portage as usual. It was an uneventful journey in, but then around 9:15 AM, the computers shut off, the regular lights went out, and some emergency lights came on. There was no electricity in the building. After about 40 minutes, we were told to go home and that we would be informed via the media as to when to come back to work again.
A coworker drove me and a few other people home. By the time I got there, my street had also lost power. But we got off lightly. By the next day, our electricity was restored, the lights were back on, and the furnace was bravely thrumming away.
Our house was heated by an aging oil furnace (since updated), although the starter relied on electricity. But we also had a woodstove that allowed us to keep reasonably warm as well as heat up food and make coffee. In fact, we were just in the process of making ourselves some coffee when the lights all came on!
But meanwhile, on the Quebec side, my office building was to remain closed for another week. It was a great chance to get caught up on a few things around the house, to do a bit of leisure reading - and to go toaster-shopping!
I could do an entire blog on toasters. The first toaster we had provided yeoman service for over twenty years. Then it broke, and we bought a new one. The new one lasted about two weeks. So we got a new new one. And after that, yet another. We were forced to the realization that they just didn't make toasters the way they used to. So once we were no longer housebound, we headed for Sears Carlingwood and found a toaster that offered a guarantee - for a dollar or two extra, if the toaster malfunctioned within a number of years (I think maybe three or five), it would be replaced with no questions asked. I've always rather sneered at this cash-cow extended warranty business but given our recent track record with toasters, we decided to give it a try. And fifteen years later, although that toaster doesn't reliably pop up by itself, it still toasts the bread perfectly well - and not over-well, as long as you keep an eye on it!
Some of the trees on our property sustained serious damage - but trees, after all, are replaceable. We got someone to haul away the fallen branches. We eventually got rid of the trees themselves and did NOT replace them - mainly because a few years of dry spells later, they were sucking the moisture from beneath our house and our house was sinking. I'm relieved that we got them removed before the tree-huggers came along and insisted on permits for tree removal even on private property. Not that I don't have treehugging propensities myself - it's just that everything in life is a bit of a balancing act and my balance isn't good enough that I'm willing to live in the trees full-time and watch the house sink down into oblivion!
I didn't know it yet, but 1998 was to be quite an eventful year for me. I was to get a home computer for the first time, one which like the toaster, is still serving me well nearly fifteen years later. On the work front, I would work on the ill-fated UCS (Universal Classification Standard). And after twelve years working over in Hull, I would move in September to a new job with a sister department in downtown Ottawa. I hadn't worked downtown since 1981, having been at Confederation Heights between 1981 and 1986.
What really struck me after not having worked downtown for all those years was the huge upsurge in the number of homeless and/or street-people. During the 1970s, the panhandlers you saw downtown were often of the weekend hippie variety, and quite often those folks were offering something like dope or subterranean newspapers in exchange for cash! The people I encountered now really did seem to be down and out. Clearly the recessions of the 1980s and 90s had taken their toll.
Also in 1998, I noticed that Algonquin College was advertising for librarians to teach part-time in their library technician programme. I answered the ad and ended up teaching evening courses for the next two years - 1999 and 2000. I turned down a request to teach a course in the summer of 2001 (by which time I was busy coming to grips with a very demanding new full-time job) and after that, they never called me back. However, I did in my new job host a couple of Algonquin technician students doing internships.
I recently dug out a book by Mark Abley, "Stories from the Ice Storm". Abley is also the author of a book called "Spoken Here", a collection of essays about endangered languages, which I started reading in Chapters one day and found enthralling enough to buy and read from cover to cover. Anyway, the stories from the Ice Storm book is one that I picked up from one of those formerly ubiquitous publishers' overstock sales that have become increasingly scarce during the past decade or so of e- and i-books. It brought back a lot of memories of what some folk were going through during the storm - and of how fortunate we were to have escaped more or less unscathed.
There's talk now, with all the government cutbacks, of the army starting to charge municipalities who ask them to intervene in the case of natural or extraordinary disasters like the ice storm - although they seem to be backtracking a bit on that idea. The energy infrastructure also seems a little different (though not necessarily better) from how it was fifteen years ago. For example, we now have time-of-use billing for electricity to reduce demand during peak periods. As well, there actually seem to be periods of time (perhaps not harnessable) when some districts actually have to PAY nearby ones to take energy OFF their hands! Is it primarily a political thing? Do we over-encourage people to use certain kinds of energy (solar, wind, etc.) at the expense of others that might make more sense? I don't know, and I think that will have to be a topic for another day.
