National Post (National Edition)
Ice storms spread fear and awe
Hundreds shiver through power outages in B.C.
After the first storm in Abbotsford, B.C., on Thursday, Brandy Verschoore was standing on her porch looking at the tree branches glazed with thick sheets of ice. She remembered thinking that it was beautiful and scary at the same time. Then, there was a bang. It was loud and pronounced. Maybe it was a gunshot, she thought. That day, police found a body in a house nearby and declared it a homicide. Maybe the violence was spreading. Verschoore and her children ran inside. “It sounded so close to us,” the single mom said later. “What if they come on our property?”
She called 9-11. “Uh, I think there was a gunshot,” she told the dispatcher.
The dispatcher said some officers would be by to check in, but before they arrived Verschoore heard another bang and realized it wasn’t a gunshot. It was a tree branch cracking under the weight of the ice and falling — one of thousands of branches and trees that fell in the aftermath of two ice storms last week, knocking out power to more than 160,000 customers across the Fraser Valley, most of them in Abbotsford and Mission, B.C. While 75 per cent were restored in the first 24 hours, nearly 70 households were out of power for four full days as temperatures dipped below zero.
B.C. Hydro dispatched 650 field workers, some from Vancouver Island and interior B.C., to fix the downed wires and poles. There were hundreds of individual outages, each requiring a dedicated team to restore power to a single house often in a remote area. And trees kept falling, kept knocking out more power lines as the teams worked. After one outage was fixed, another was created somewhere else, B.C. Hydro spokeswoman Mora Scott said.
Carla Parsons walked around Mission in the middle of the outages and was struck by the quiet chaos of it all. “It was eerie,” she said. “That’s all you could hear: Constantly just the crackle of falling branches and trees. People lost entire trees all the way down to the roots. Massive trees. There was one day we couldn’t get out of the neighbourhood.”
Mike Hopcraft lost power at his reptile rescue centre in Mission and started desperately looking for a generator to keep his 120 snakes, lizards, turtles and tortoises warm. He put out a plea on his Facebook page and within 10 or 15 minutes someone lent him one. His outage lasted a day.
“As soon as I have the money, I’ve got to buy a generator,” he said.
Verschoore, the single mom in Abbotsford, was among the worst affected, left without power from Dec. 28 until New Year’s Day. Her power went out around 11:30 p.m. on Dec. 28. All the lights in her basement suite went out and the kids’ video game went dead. “My kids started screaming,” she said.
That night, they tried to sleep but the branches kept falling, smacking the side of the house. “I thought a tree was going to come through our house,” she said. “We were freaked out.” By 1 a.m., Verschoore was fed up. “I didn’t sleep,” she said.
She rounded up the five children and headed for a friend’s house nearby, where they slept in the basement. They stayed there for three nights, until New Year’s Eve. Not wanting to disrupt her friend’s New Year’s plans, she and the children left.
She had party poppers and sparklers, hoping to spend the evening at home. But power had not been restored at their house. Verschoore’s landlord cautioned against returning since a hydro pole had crashed down, causing a gas leak and spreading power lines across the driveway.
“We were gonna end up sleeping in our vehicle that night,” she said.
She called another friend asking if she could drop off her dog, a little Shitzu-Maltese mix, for the night. When Verschoore showed up with the dog in her Dodge Caravan, the friend wouldn’t let her leave. “You’re staying,” she said.
“I was so relieved,” Verschoore said. “It was like, we didn’t have clothes other than the clothes on our back. We didn’t have much for food.
“You feel like a horrible mom at that point, because you don’t prepare yourself for this. I felt like I was letting my kids down.”
On Tuesday, after nearly a week out away from home, Verschoore was heading home. The last of the customers without power on Tuesday — some 200 — were expected to be restored by the Tuesday evening.