Ice storm impact: Power outages, campus closures
WATERLOO — India-born Tamara Menon had heard the stories of Ontario ice storms, of branches shimmering like crystal chandeliers and the landscape gleaming with light. It all seemed so romantic until she actually experienced this weekend’s storm.
“I was kinda excited, a little nervous,” she said. “I’d heard it’s really beautiful.
“Now I don’t know if I want to see a beautiful ice-covered tree.”
Menon is an international community music student at Wilfrid Laurier University, having come from Mumbai, India, in September 2016. Sure, she has experienced bad weather, the snow and cold, the mistaken thinking that it was OK to walk to the grocery store 20 minutes away instead of taking a bus when temperatures dip below
0 C.
She has learned a lot living in Canada. And as she is about to head back to Mumbai at the end of the month, Menon will go from one extreme to the other.
Ice and cold in Canada, suffocating heat in India.
“In Mumbai, when it’s 20 degrees, it’s cold,” she said. “That’s summer in Canada. My first winter in Canada, it was minus 21 Celsius, that was very difficult for me.
“I’m going home on the 30th, it’s 40 degrees at home. It’s summer and it can go to 45 to 49, and it’s really humid.” Then there is the extreme flooding during monsoon season, June to August.
“It’s a different kind of struggle,” she said.
As of noon Saturday, none of Menon’s housemates in the Wa-
terloo house they share had roused themselves from bed, perhaps thinking Mother Nature was playing a vile, post-April Fool’s Day joke on everyone.
Menon did end up missing a psychology exam, given Laurier, the University of Waterloo and Conestoga College had all closed their campuses and cancelled exams. The ice storm gave her a reprieve and some time to instead work on a paper due Tuesday.
Kitchener-Wilmot Hydro was dealing with a power outage in the Doon South neighbourhood Sunday afternoon. It said fallen tree limbs caused an outage affecting about 500 customers. It expected to have the power restored by 9 p.m.
Meanwhile, while vacationing in Florida, another Waterloo resident was wondering what fresh new evil Ontario weather was wreaking on his New Hamburg business.
“The ice storm doesn’t affect what we do (growing crops) but we do have to deliver food on Monday,” said Wolfgang Pfenning, chief executive officer of Pfenning's Organic & More in New Hamburg.
His big worry was weather and road conditions for Sunday, when all the delivery trucks hauling everything from tender fruit from California to tomatoes from Leamington greenhouses arrive to Pfennings distribution warehouse in New Hamburg. If there are any delays, big problems can erupt. On a good day, trucks pull up to the loading dock and unload Sunday morning. Workers then pull all the orders together and on Monday, Pfenning trucks are loaded up and the products shipped to grocery stores.
“It’s a like a huge gear box with a million gears,” he said. “It’s a big game of logistics and if you throw in a wrench ... an ice storm is a wrench.”
As for the crops, Pfenning said this weekend’s ice storm won’t affect anything, given the farm doesn’t start planting until May 1, but once that calendar page flips to next month, then the need for good weather is more urgent.
“There is nothing we can do, we’ll plant when the time is ready,” he said. “The weather never asks our opinion.”
Ken Martin, operations manager for Martin’s Family Fruit Farm, said the ice storm will have little effect on the half-million apple trees planted on the farm’s 303.5 hectares (750 acres), west of St. Jacobs, but that’s only because the weather has never really warmed up this spring so the trees are still asleep.
“Usually about now, we start seeing the first green (bud),” he said. “This year, it’s a lot later.
“The trees are still in a dormant state, it’s no different than winter.”
Martin also noted, apple trees are designed to have flexible branches, meaning even heavy ice coatings won’t cause much breakage or damage.
“It’s not much of an issue for apple trees,” he said.