Ice storm - game still on!

[Colin_Fraser]

Last weekend Canada and the NE US got hammered by a freak ice storm. For far too many,there is no electricity leading to some deaths, ruined Christmas celebrations and financial loss due to frozen and burst water pipes. Plus lots of my coworkers at Hydro One Networks and other local utilities have been working in dreadful and dangerous conditions to help out ASAP. Also lots of assistance coming in from out of province. Just thinking of them all while i sit comfortably in my home with heat and electricity.

Below you can see some photos of my neighbours' homes and a 40' stand of willows that came down in my backyard. Who says a white Christmas is best?

Stay safe all.

Colin

 

[John Bowery]

Colin,
That is some storm.
Hope you all come out O.K.
John

 

[Mark S]

Sorry to hear of the terrible Winter ordeal there Colin.....such a shame at Christmas.
Hard for us here to imagine such conditions in the midst of our Summer here.
All the best to you and everyone affected.

 

[Don]

Colin, just seen your storm today BBC busy with our storm. Looks awful mate, snow has to be seen to be believed. Hope it melts soon, but that brings another problem.

We are having a festive flooding and from what I have seen a lot of England is underwater. Started before Christmas and many people are still without power. They seem to get one place reconnected, due to very hard work, when somewhere else goes down. Just awful, especially at this time of year. Some places have been without power since it started, rather a WW2 feeling about their festivities.
I hope all our members are safe and everyone else puts their figures in plastic bags, or boxes and hide them in the loft till the rain eases off.

Don

 

[Uruk-Hai]

Man, we are having the sweetest winter ever. We only had about 2cm snow in the beginning of December, which melted away in two Days. And the temperature has been about +2 - +6 degres Celsius for the past Three weeks.

I was thinking about mowing the lawn on Christmas Eve.

Cheers
Janne Nilsson

 

[Colin_Fraser]

That's global warming - unpredictable extremes. We have folk in Toronto who have been without power and heat for a week now. I can only imagine their misery and frustration. All I lost was a nice stand of trees, a lawn swing, and a fence.

Safe and happy new year to all.

Colin

 

[ChaosCossack]

Hey Colin
I lost power at 7 am Sunday and it finally came back on at 9pm on Wednesday. My cable/internet didn't come back until Friday morning. Every scrap of food in my fridge and deepfreeze is now in the garbage. Every broadleaf tree on our property lost at least a couple of limbs and one evergreen tipped right over. Spent most of sunday and monday clearing the brush falls. Had to move Christmas dinner to my monster-in-law's place...

Overall a crappy week.

On the bright side I may get some figure bases out of some of the chunks of oak, maple, linden and katalpa wood I've stacked up for cutting.

Glad to hear you got through it all relatively unscathed

Colin

 

[Colin_Fraser]

Colin. I figured you might be out as you appeared to be on silent running. Sucks that you had to spend that much time clearing up. I opted to buy a large chainsaw rather than call a tree service but my 21 year old disappeared into downtown Oakville with it and made a couple of g's in 2 days. Now indeed to put him to work here. Glad you are OK.

From CBC -

The enormous scope of the damage:

Forty per cent of the city's power lines, which would cross Canada twice, have been affected by the storm.
Thirty-thousand pieces of equipment have been installed back into the grid and about 47,000 metres of cable have gone back up into the air. The City of Toronto says about 20 per cent of the city's tree canopy has been damaged and it could take seven weeks to clean up all the fallen limbs.

And that's just the city - most of southern Ontario got hit as badly, as well as several other provinces here and US states.

Colin