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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

Me, reading the headline: "Aw shit, was that us in '98?"

Open the article: "Over the week spanning Jan. 4-10, 1998..."

That was honestly a wild time. I was almost 12. School was closed for 2-3 weeks because they couldn't promise there would be electricity to heat the building. The ice kept breaking power lines or crushing the transmission towers from the weight (ice is heavy!). Imagine your car, covered in a 1-2 inch thick layer of very solid ice, encased.

People died. The military had to come in to help. My family was fortunate that we had a wood stove in the basement that kept the house warm and cooked some meals on. We lost power a few hours at least every day.

Crazy time.

Edit: For those interested in this, the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_1998_North_American_ic...) has some great photos and description. 1,000 transmission towers/pylons destroyed, 35,000 utility poles. Whole forests devastated.

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The Ice Storm as it was aptly called.

We were lucky that we were on a road designated as an emergency route, and though power was down, our internet still worked.

My dad was handy so he set me up on my laptop with a car battery, and my life as a shy, hypersensitive, introvert who found solace being away from people and on my computer - learning to code through adding features and a fixed ASCII interface for the text-based MUD I was building - debugging as I went, using my mother's university account server to host it initially; he also brought in a BBQ and heated the house with propane - not recommended as you need to know the cautions.

Photos: https://www.google.com/search?q=1998+ice+storm+canada

Came hear to also say "I remember that". Glad to see fellow Ice-Stormers here. We were in Maine, on the coast. We were lucky enough to have a wood stove for heat. And we were close enough to the ocean that the kids (me) would go down to the ocean at high-tide to fill up 5-gallon buckets with sea-water. We used those to flush our toilets for a full week. Oh, And I had to walk to school in that ice storm - up hill, both ways ;-).

You reminded me my dad something similar for the toilets - living close to Lake Ontario. :)

I grew up south of Ottawa and remember this storm well. Ice 10cm thick on downed power lines and transmission towers. I lived in a rural town south of Ottawa (Winchester) and school buses would be cancelled on any rain that happened when the temperature was below freezing. The literal first day of the ice rain (that lasted for a solid week) was on the first day we were supposed to go back after the xmas break. School was out for two weeks (so a straight month off). On top of that, it was the year of the Mike Harris teacher strikes, which meant we got a two week break a few months earlier. When we did eventually return to school, the army and requisitioned our gymnasium and they cooked us all free cafeteria food for two weeks.

Winchester was an Ontario Hydro hub, so I was only without power for about a day and a half (we had a wood stove, too). So this nerd had internet and video games. The only "tough" job I had to do was help my grandfather clear his driveway of the thick ice, which took hours (salt was impossible to come by at this point).

I was also outside Ottawa(West) at the time. I remember hearing the trees collapsing as they failed under the weight, it was like mini explosions. We were out for about 48 hours but our neighbours' line to the road down their long driveway failed and so they were out almost 2 weeks.

Laptop with a car battery? 12V DC to 160 or whatever AC?

Probably a DC-DC adapter, bypassing the power brick entirely.

That would make sense, really interested in the details. Unrelated to anything, but makes me wonder how horribly inefficient running a car I4 is for providing power.

Internal combustion engines emit the majority of their energy as heat. A typical gasoline engine is 20% efficient at turning gasoline into rotational power. (and that's under ideal usage, usually they're designed to be most efficient at operating speed, not at idle) Anything you have connected to the crankshaft after that is additional inefficiency on top of that.

Laptops (and computers in general) run on 12V DC and 5V DC (and more recently also 3.3V DC) internally. Modern laptop chargers tend to put out around 20V DC to charge the battery and stepped down by power management circuits. Not sure if it was already 20V in '98 or if laptops were still using 12V DC to charge the NiCads, I seem to remember car chargers that plugged the laptop directly into the cigarette lighter.

I'm a bit surprised you had either a laptop or broadband Internet (as opposed to dial-up) in 1998. I may have had (barely) a work laptop by then but I didn't get home broadband until maybe a couple years later.

One of my former colleagues worked on disaster response in the northern Adirondacks and areas around the border. From his tales, it was pretty harrowing, basically bringing the region into circa 1880 technology overnight.

It was pre-911 before emergency response was well funded which made things more challenging. They were dealing with frozen everything, no power, no cellular, impassable roads, etc.

And yet, to this day, power lines are still not put under ground in most of north america.

Sure that costs, but it saves your butt in times like these.

Power lines are not put under ground in most of the world. Nobody wants to pay an order of magnitude more to hedge against occasional downsides in reality.

Then "nobody" should be complaining about those downsides when they are freezing their butts off on winter days like these or when they yet again have to throw away all their freezer contents because an autumn storm blew the power lines in all of their neighborhood away. My Twitter feed has those complaints of friends-of-friends quite regularly.

I thought the same thing. I was 11, in 6th grade and remember it pretty clearly. We had the wood fireplace going non-stop, and yet we had it fairly easy in comparison with 'only' 2 weeks without power in the Ottawa area.

I remember walking over huge snowbanks on our front yard and it was all frozen solid. We could almost walk straight up onto the house roof.

My parents lived in the countryside in the middle of the "dark triangle". They went without power for about 30 days in the middle of winter. They lived in the basement around the wood stove. Dad was an obstetrician, and Mom was his secretary. They kept the home office open and he examined his patients using a flashlight, then candlelight when the batteries ran out.

I remember that, luckily we were spared in Toronto.

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