For many, it’s hard to believe 20 years have passed since the Ice Storm of 1998. Freezing rain, followed by frigid temperatures left Kingston under a thick coat of ice.
“I remember at about 5 a.m. in the morning, being woken up to the sound of a tree crashing through the roof of my home,” Gary Bennett, the mayor of Kingston in 1998, said.
In the end, more than three million people in Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia were left in the dark.
“We were stranded for sure. We didn’t have any electricity or water for seven days,” Kingston resident Sylvia Robb said.
Back then, Robb and her family lived in a rural area on the outskirts of Kingston, where access to the “outside world” was halted for at least a few days. She remembers doing things like breaking the ice in the family pool to use the water to flush toilets, or boiling that water to clean dishes.
After a week with no electricity, she had to act quickly to salvage food left in her family’s freezer.
“So the neighbours got together and had a cookout, a barbecue cookout,” Robb remembers. “It was quite memorable.”
Another Kingston resident, Matt Brigden, remembers that week vividly, when he along with other neighbours in the central part of the city went door-to-door with a generator, plugging in furnaces long enough to heat homes and avoid freezing pipes.
“That was the main thing, to keep the furnaces on because [the cold] was just brutal,” Brigden said.
With the exception of a smaller storm in 2013, Kingston hasn’t seen anything like it since, but if it ever does, at least they’d know what to expect.
“The reality was that there was no emergency plan that told us how to deal with the ice storm. It was virtually unprecedented,” Bennett said.
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