Storm Warning: Gambling With the Climate of Our Planet - Couverture souple

Dotto, Lydia

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0385257902 ISBN 13 : 9780385257909

Editeur : Doubleday of Canada, 2000

Synopsis

Book by Dotto Lydia

A propos du livre

Extrait

It was dubbed "Beauty and the Beast."

The blanket of ice, several centimeters thick, certainly gave the trees, roads, bridges, and buildings a winter-wonderland quality. But beneath the beautiful exterior lurked a beast without mercy, one that brought much of the northeastern part of North America to its knees for several weeks and strained the social and technological resources of the most advanced industrial society in the world to a shocking degree.

On Monday, January 5, 1998, a huge mass of warm air laden with moisture barreled up from the Gulf of Mexico, causing severe flooding along the U.S. east coast, and slammed into a shallow layer of cold air hunkered down in teh Ottawa and St. Lawrence valleys. Unable to displace the dense, cold mass, the warm air climbed on top and, as it cooled, dumped copious amounts of water into the frigid air below.

With temperatures hovering around 0°C -- warmer than usual for the time of year -- the result was freezing rain and lots of it. Because the cold air mass was shallow, the water didn't have time to make it all the way to snow; instead it became supercooled droplets that froze on contact with every exposed surface, creating layer after layer of a very tough, adhesive glaze. As Environment Canada senior climatologist David Phillips put it, "This is the hardest kind of ice -- you can only break it with a hammer."

It would have been bad enough if the storm had simply dumped its moisture and moved on, which is the typical pattern for such weather events in Canada. But the large weather system that caused it persisted, dropping rain in three waves over five days. On Tuesday night, Ottawa's weather forecast was ominous: "A series of disturbances is approaching ... bringing episodes of freezing rain, one after the other. By Thursday morning, 15 to 20 millimeters of freezing rain is expected to have fallen. Thursday into Friday remains to be seen -- pray for plain rain."

Unfortunately, "plain rain" was not in the cards; Thursday night into Friday brought yet another wave of the frozen stuff. By week's end, the Ottawa and Montreal regions got a total of about 80 hours of rain, far in excess of the 45 to 65 hours they typically get in a whole year. An estimated 70 to 110 millimeters fell in parts of eastern Ontario and southern Quebec -- possibly more in some parts of the "black triangle," an area south of Montreal that suffered massive power losses. Ultimately, the region got about two years' worth of freezing rain in five days. It was roughly two to three times worse than the worst ice storms of the past, which had dropped about 25 to 35 millimeters of rain.

Several factors influence the severity of ice storms, including the amount of precipitation that falls, the duration of the event, and the extent of the area affected. This storm would have been extreme by any of these measures, but all of them together made it catastrophic. By Saturday, when the rain finally stopped, an enormous region stretching from the middle of Ontario to southern Quebec, east to the Atlantic provinces and south into the New England states had been coated with a deadly glaze measuring up to 9 centimeters thick in the worst-hit locations. This was more than double the thickness of ice deposited in the worst previous ice storms in 1986 and 1961.

Trees snapped under the strain, showering the ground with broken branches and wrist-thick shards of ice, the sound echoing through the streets like volleys of gunshots. Power lines, looped like icy garlands on a Christmas tree, hung to the ground until, burdened beyond bearing, they too snapped and tumbled into the snow, hissing and crackling with energy that had nowhere to go. It didn't take long for the crackling to stop, though, as utility poles and transmission towers  began to crack and topple, littering the bleak winter landscape with piles of fractured wood and twisted clumps of metal. Like decapitated behemoths, crippled pylons stretched as far as the eye could see, resembling the abandoned relics of some otherworldly war.

The lights went out. The heat went off. At the height of the storm, more than four million people in four Canadian provinces and four U.S. states were left freezing in the dark as the electrical lifeblood of modern industrial civilization was relentlessly choked off by the ice. "The only person with power around here is Mother Nature and clearly we're no match for her," one Montreal resident told the CBC.

Power to the island of Montreal, the second largest city in Canada, hung by a thread; four of five transmission lines feeding high-voltage bulk electricity from James Bay hundreds of kilometers to the north were cut off. On Thursday night, with ice still accreting on every surface, Montreal came within a hairsbreadth of a total blackout. "It was a very, very close call," Quebec Premier Lucien Bouchard revealed later. "The line was watched ... the whole night. We really thought we might lose Montreal." City officials said that Montreal had been on the verge of losing its water supply, as well as heat and electricity, and that firefighters had been prepared to bulldoze buildings if necessary to keep fires from getting out of hand.

By the second week, up to 100,000 people had moved into shelters; thousands more took refuge in hotels or with family, friends, or complete strangers who still had heat. But most people tried to tough it out in their frigid homes, with periodic visits to shelters or friends' homes for a hot meal, a shower, or a chance to get warm for a while. The elderly, distraught at the idea of abandoning their homes, often refused until police were given extraordinary powers to force their evacuation if necessary. Some who left never returned -- at least one heart attack was attributed to the stress of moving -- but some who stayed met an equally unhappy fate, dying of hypothermia or carbon monoxide poisoning from using poorly ventilated heating devices. In the end, at least 25 deaths were attributed to the storm.

Hospitals and nursing homes struggled to care for their patients and to deal with the influx of storm-related injuries and illnesses, counting on overworked emergency generators to keep chaos at bay. In Canada, more than 14,000 soldiers were deployed, the largest peacetime military mobilization in the country's history. More accustomed to peacekeeping in far-flung war zones, they were glad to help their own people but astonished at the damage nature had wrought. A soldier who'd served in Bosnia commented that Montreal was just like Sarajevo "without the bullets" -- although dodging falling ice projectiles couldn't be much of an improvement. U.S. Vice President Al Gore, touring the worst-hit areas of Maine, said the area looked like it had been hit with a neutron bomb.

It was hard to imagine that things could get worse, but then winter returned with a vengeance; in the second week, a cold front moved in, accompanied by heavy snow and high winds. In Quebec and Ontario, temperatures dropped into the double digits below freezing; in the Montreal area, where more than a million people were still without heat, nighttime temperatures plunged to -35°C with the windchill. Then it started snowing. Upstate New York and New England were clobbered with up to 45 centimeters of snow.

Utility companies in the region had an unprecedented crisis on their hands. More than 5000 utility workers were pressed into service, working around the clock in 16-hour shifts, battling freezing temperatures and blowing snow in a desperate struggle to patch together a fragile and badly crippled power grid. Utilities from all over North America sent people and equipment. (One linesman from Hawaii, who commented wryly that he'd been surfing just the day before, had to borrow clothing suitable for -20° temperatures.) In the first few days, when the rain just kept coming, it was a hopeless task. "We're fighting a battle we can't win right now," said one weary worker with an ice-encrusted face after repairing a line for the third time.

In the early stages, many people were unable to accept that technology would not quickly get the upper hand over nature. It took several days for the full import of the crisis to sink in. People who live in this part of the world are no strangers to vicious winter storms; they've seen snow and ice before. But this storm left them shell-shocked. Many who were camped out in freezing homes or shelters for weeks remarked how humbling it was to have been brought to such a state so abruptly. It had shaken their faith in both their own resilience and that of the social order.

It was clear by the end of the first week that the storm would likely become the most costly natural disaster in Canadian history. Early predictions that it would become the first billion-dollar loss for the Canadian insurance industry proved true. The total tab for property and business losses and repairing the power system is expected to exceed $2 billion.

For many, the most disconcerting aspect of the storm was that it took barely three days to cripple a power system that had taken five decades to build -- a system that boasted half the installed hydroelectric capacity in North America. Hydro-Québec said its power lines had been built to the highest standard in North Maerica, able to withstand ice up to 4.5 centimeters, nearly four times the national Canadian standard. Yet it was facing daunting losses: an estimated 40% of its distribution network would have to be rebuilt at an estimated cost of about $650 million. More than 30,000 hydro poles worth $3000 each had been downed, as had 130 major transmission towers worth $100,000 each and more than 800 smaller pylons. Hydro spokesperson Robin Philpott tried to put these numbers in perspective. "Never have we lost a tower before," he told the CBC. "This is beyond nature."

Montreal Gazette journalist Mark Abley wrote that from November to April, daily life in most of...

Présentation de l'éditeur

The Ice Storm of 1998. The flooding of Manitoba of 1997. Wherever you live, it's likely you've experienced some extreme weather lately. A recent report from the Red Cross stated that natural catastrophes in 1998 has wreaked the most havoc on record, and warned that a series of "super-disasters" could be imminent. What's behind all this stormy weather?

In Storm Warning, science writer Lydia Dotto shows there's strong evidence our climate is changing due to human interference, and that the events of recent years are just a dress rehearsal for dramatic changes in the earth's climate.

Climate conferences like those held in Rio in 1992 and Kyoto in 1997 were supposed to set the world on a course for change. Instead, they have led to political squabbles, watered-down resolutions and a disturbing failure to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that have been targeted as the main culprit in creating the global warming trend.

Storm Warning illustrates the dire consequences of delay and inaction on both the personal and political fronts. In the climate change game the stakes are disturbingly high -- with the very future of life on our planet at risk.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Doubleday of Canada
• Date d'édition: 2000
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0385257902
• ISBN 13: 9780385257909
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 344
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible