IceStorm 98 Study

Anne Lukits [AL] remembers leaving work at 3:15 on Wednesday and going to pick up her daughter at school. It had been raining all day and she had been chipping ice off her car all day. On the radio she had heard that “some sort of freezing rain storm was expected.”

She picked up her daughter and her daughter’s friend at school, got some groceries and went home. When the other parents arrived to pick up their daughter, AL leaned out the door to wave hello and noticed that her car was coated with ice again. This was about 5 pm Wednesday evening. “It was raining so hard it was just pelting -but everything was freezing right away.” She hadn’t realized that the weather had deteriorated so much in the last hour.

AL is living alone during weekdays this year with her 8.5 year old daughter as her husband is working in Toronto.

AL recalls nothing else being exceptionally strange until she went to bed and noticed the rain still pelting “relentlessly” against the house, “it was very eerie.” At about 11:45 she was still awake when the power went off. She got up and looked at the storm outside and was “up and down all night” since she couldn’t sleep well.

When she went downstairs, AL noted the temperature in their fish tanks had dropped considerably and that the house was quite cold. “I thought this was not a good sign, but still didn’t think it was going to be bad.”

She called her husband in Toronto at 7:30 am to report what was going on with the weather and that there were some big tree limbs down around the house. She also asked about how to get their portable radio working. After a few minutes he phoned back to say that he was going to skip class and try to take the 9 am train to Kingston. He did get into Kingston on time, but that was the last train. “It became known as the 18 hour train [because] it left Kingston, went 5 minutes towards Brockville, stopped on the tracks and stayed there for 18 hours.

By the time her husband got home, around 11:30 am, they were aware that “this was an extraordinary storm.” They thought about moving the car but the layer of ice was so thick over the lock, “...it was like peering through a huge ice cube to look at the lock on the car.”

The schools were closed, so she had to stay home with her daughter. But her “immediate consideration” was about what she would be able to do in terms of work for the paper. She had to stay with her child but her instincts were also “...to get outside and take a look around, because it was compelling from a reporter’s point of view.”

AL thinks Jack Chiang called her Thursday shortly after 9 am from a cell phone. She’s not sure if she was aware at that point that the paper had moved to the offset plant to finish its production [since there was no power at the Whig offices].

AL recalls that it was dark outside and dark inside and that she had to find some candles. Jack Chiang “immediately rattled off an assignment,” she thinks it was to do a “definitive story” on the utilities angle. “...and I was cold, and it was dark, and I had a kid, and we were very bewildered, and I had not slept well, and I knew he needed me. I think I was probably pretty torn.”

She tried to keep her daughter busy and come up with a work plan “...that was more realistic for me to do from home, and propose it back . I knew I was not going to be able to get out of the house or near my car.” “So what could I realistically do that would help the paper and help Jack. It wasn’t going to be the definitive utilities angle.”

So she proposed to do some telephone interviews. “...I think we all thought this was going to be over anyway by mid afternoon.”

“So I was looking at a short-term inconvenience in the beginning. But it did put me in a situation where I was in the kitchen with the phone crooked to my ear and a candle lit and a note pad and freezing cold hands and a bored child and a radio blaring ‘don’t go outside.’”

Fortunately, she never had problems with the phone; although the service was torn away from the house leaving a huge whole, the line stayed intact. They sent their daughter to play next door while AL and her husband worked on fixing the hole to keep water out.

Then it was back to work on the phone to try to get more information and “a sense of what’s happening.” Although it was frustrating not to “be there for the paper,” AL did her story interviews by phone and then called Jack Chiang to relay the story to him.

She realized she could contribute from home, but suffered “from a lot of guilt about not being able to do more.” Although AL was able to report some factual material and “meat and potatoes information” about what people should be doing or not doing, “...there was obviously a real story happening but I couldn’t be part of that.”

The power came on briefly Thursday but it was essentially a “lost day.” “Then it went off and we never saw a flicker of light until the next Tuesday night.”

AL’s husband works for the Whig as well but is off for a year. He took his portable computer and went to help the rest of the staff, who had moved to the paper’s offset plant, with putting the paper together.

Her main focus by Friday was to get information about the shelters that were popping up.

Sometime around mid morning Friday she decided to go out for a look around the neighbourhood with her daughter. “[We] picked our way down the street between the wires and trees that were down, we were stunned. In shock.” When they returned home she put the key in the lock but it wouldn’t turn. She couldn’t open the door and there was no-one around to help. Finally she saw someone in army fatigues and asked him to help with opening her door. He couldn’t open it either and they realized that the lock was broken and not just frozen. Eventually he took off the side door to get into the house.

AL resumed her phone calls by candle light and did what she could to “contribute to the body of facts the paper was trying to get out to people.” The stories were written down in long and short hand and then phoned in to Jack Chiang. He would write them down as she dictated over the phone. But at the same time he was dealing with a constant stream of interruptions. It took a long time.

AL remembers that the nature of reporting changed during that period. The reporters became “...more of an information vehicle; ...you just were there to help.” Consequently, “the relationships you would normally have with some of the people you were speaking to changed. Sometimes they were, in the past, ...antagonistic...well all that fell by the wayside, it was just ‘how can we help- what do you need us to put in the paper that will help you’. Those lines immediately became nice and clear and simple. We were all in this together...and people were very appreciative and incredibly cooperative . People phoned back who you knew were also in difficult circumstances.”

But AL felt constantly torn between her work and home responsibilities; “If I could have closed up the house and simply left with a note pad to do what I knew really needed to be done -it would have been great -it would have been the best way to do it I suppose, but you can’t ignore your family’s needs.”

By Saturday/Sunday they had settled into a routine at home. “This was the turning point, I think, we heard that the Queen’s gym was open and the public was allowed to go and shower there. We went out in the car and visited other areas of the city. The essential storm was past. There was a somewhat liberating feeling that you were out. But the realization was, coming home, that we weren’t going to have power for quite a while -because once you’re out you see the extent of the damage. Its not just your yard, our street, its a huge area.”

She started back to work on Sunday and worked solid through the week. The office had moved back from the offset plant and AL felt she was making up for the time that she couldn’t make it in to the office. “Also, it was warm in [there] and there was electricity.” She was “...happy to come to work for all sorts of reasons.”

Conditions had improved at work. Jack Chiang was co-ordinating it all. “He was very good to adapt to reporter’s ideas for stories.”

AL went out to the PUC kitchen because she had heard that it was an amazing place with “unbelievable donations coming in.” She arrived unannounced, “...which you don’t normally do...” but was well received. “The barriers you would normally meet as a reporter were just not there. People welcomed you, they couldn’t talk to you enough.”

“Normally there was a bit more of a tug of war between you and an institution you were trying to get information from. It wasn’t anymore, it was ‘how can we help you.’”

AL was so aware of this that she wondered how things would ever get back to the way they were before the storm. “The traditional reporter - interview relationship [was] not there anymore.

This condition applied even to mistakes that were made in the paper. “There were errors but everyone was in great humour about errors. Usually they are more hostile. They tended to find mistakes funny.”

Regarding her Jim Keech interview, AL felt “driven to talk to him.” “I wanted to talk to people at the core, at the heart, of the action.” It was to satisfy a personal/reporter need.

After things settled down, there was space in the paper and she suggested an interview with Keech. The editors wanted to move on to other topics but she felt a strong need to talk to him.

“I can’t remember ever, in all the years that I’ve reported, where I have really felt that I was just dying to talk to the person. I really wanted to know what it was like to be Jim Keech during this event. I knew he was new and young and just appointed to this position. But this was an electrical crisis more than any other thing... [and] ...everything came back to Jim Keech.

AL isn’t even sure she wanted to do this interview because she is a reporter, but being a reporter was her excuse to get it. “Had he been my neighbour I would have talked to him.”

After the storm she talked to other people in her role as reporter about other things but they were all eager to know what it was like to be in the crisis. Whether it was at the train station or somewhere in Toronto, total strangers were eager to know what it was like. “You might think you’d get bored with this story but I’m still not bored with it. I’m finding, in the weeks after, that the trading of stories...in the line up at Loblaws, at the bank, on chance encounters on the street, at a meeting in Indigo [a book store] on a Friday night, [people ask] ‘what happened to you?’ [and] you really wanted to hear, not just tell.”