47 Replies to “I Amuse Myself”

  1. I don’t understand why there’d be an emergency, with so much solar and wind power at our fingertips….
    A little ice storm should be a great excuse to relax with a cup of solar-heated hot chocolate while watching your video fireplace…

  2. Stay safe my eastern confreres. Check up on the sick and the elderly.
    We had our floods. You’ve got your ice storms. Pull together and all will be well, eventually.
    Good luck.

  3. But when you are a modern progressive, power comes form the wall plug, water from the facet and food is always at the supermarket.
    And it is your absolute right to have the world ever so.
    So a little ice storm, knocking down the hydro lines =EOW.
    It is not their responsibility to plan for an emergency, thats governments job.
    Alternate heat sources, back up lighting, a gas generator, candles or a cheap 12 volt inverter run off of their car?
    Nope its always;”Somebody should do something about it”
    Fortunately for the rest of us, the maths is hard group, are also completely helpless,If you can keep them at bay for 10 days, they will no longer bother anyone.
    But their belief that man can dominate the weather,is a delusion of great comfort to them, even an ice storm, tornado or colder than average winter will not shake this faith.
    From suffering slight discomfort to outright survival threats from the vagaries of the weather, these people of the true faith, will insist that they are suffering because of the acts of other men.
    Indifferent or evil men, depending upon their self confidence, but its someone else’s fault, always.
    They scare the c**p out of me, these people will form mobs, howling for the blood of the “witches”.
    In the Cult of Calamitous Climate, witch means anyone who fails to bow to the magic gas.
    Mass slaughter is possible, long before any of these nitwits will ever look in a mirror.
    I say get in early, let us blame the solar activity for all our weather, and claim the sun is low on fuel.
    Then it is logical,by cult thinking,to sacrifice believers of the Magic Gas,by firing them into the sun.

  4. I have been watching this on the news. Trees have been falling onto power lines. You’d think they would have learned their lesson from the ice storm in 1998 and from hurricane Sandy. Trees near power lines need to be cut back!

  5. Those wind turbines must be down. I can’t imagine those things shedding 100 ft icicles and chucking them on the locals

  6. We still have power in Oshawa, but many neighbourhoods don’t. There are trees down everywhere, including a big limb off my neighbours tree in my back yard. There is a tree down across the end of my street. I took a kitchen mallet to my car to break off enough ice to get in, then ran it for an hour to get the rest of the ice off. I’m not going anywhere today but i have to go to work tomorrow. It’s a good thing I’ve got lots of rum in the house for these kinds of problems.

  7. No cutting back the trees allowed.
    Trees are sacred to the cult, except when burned for power.
    It is a sin, in the eyes of our progressives, to uglify the neighbourhoods by doing preventive maintenance on the grid.
    But its always the hydro workers fault when these easily prevented line damages occur.

  8. We had 3 day power outage after an ice storm in SE SK in the 70’s. It wasn’t the fault of trees – the weight of ice on the power lines toppled them.

  10. 14 KW automatic standby generator.
    Lots of supplies.
    Listening to the generator rumbling outside bothering my Liberal neighbour…priceless.

  11. Clearly the green energy programs are working! Temperatures are coming down! Way to go Ontario and enjoy!

  12. As they freeze in downtown Toronto, they can at least be happy they have a very, very low carbon footprint for the duration of the storm.
    So progressive of our Progressives.

  13. I believe it was 1970 we had an ice storm that took out all the power and telephone lines in eastern Alberta. A lot of the farmers had recently converted from coal heat to natural gas. Some of the wiser farmers kept the old coal furnaces ‘just in case’. Their wisdom showed during that storm. The power company had to rent horses from the local farmers to replace the poles where they had broken off. Their equipment couldn’t go where a horse could.

  14. You can’t believe how much we Albertans don’t care about Toronto’s weather or Toronto’s mayor.

  15. Watching the emergency presser just now with Mayor Ford,Dep.Mayor etc..and what is the TO media concerned about? WHO is making the call,and receiving the updates on this situation..ie is Ford being shut out of the process?? Pitiful.

  16. Disgusting treatment of rob Ford again on national news by the media party.
    Another free pass for Premier Wynne who is nowhere to be seen in this Ontario ice storm.
    ???? where is she?????

  17. LOL,You can’t believe how much we Ontarian s don’t care about Toronto’s weather or Toronto’s mayor.

  18. Power lines in my neck of the woods are buried, so lack of power isn’t an issue.
    I’ve been up since 5 am – that’s when I heard a great roar and discovered a significant chunk of my neighbour’s tree came crashing down over the fence and into my yard. Four more big branches have come down since that time, and you can hear massive cracks and crashes every few minutes.
    Since I couldn’t sleep I went out to Walmart & Loblaw’s, and there is tree damage everywhere. The roads at that time weren’t too bad but now they’ve iced right up.
    I wiped out on the front step – Bobby Orr flying through the air, but feet first. Thank goodness for post ice chopping beer.

  20. You only have to go through one serious winter wipe out storm to know you’ve got to be prepared. Ice storm of 98.
    In eastern Ont right now and the sky is solid pink as can be from one horizon to the other horizon, all the way around, wow. Even making the snow look pink. How’s that saying go? Pink at night sailors delight? Stay safe everyone and Merry Christmas.

  21. It would be hysterically funny if they actually declared an emergency.. The way the provincial legislation and municipal emergency plan.. Only the mayor at the munivipal level can declare.. And during the declared emergency he/she effectively become dictators..all decisions are made bythe head of council.. Council is forbidden to interfere.. Fun times

  22. Went thru something very similar to this ice-storm in SE Man.few yrs ago.We live deep in the bush..no power/phone for 5 solid days.Guess what? We survived! We cut up the trees,used them in woodstove,used the stove to cook on,melt snow to wash with.Never missed a day of hair-washing,or spongebathing.Had enough bottled water to cook with,and ran the generator for all-important coffee.The venison sausage cooked in cast-iron fry pan were tasty,made big pot of venison hamb.chili…it was great!Only thing I missed was access to computer!

  23. Ran a generator test yesterday; got enough gasoline, food and water to last a few weeks. Come and git’me!

  24. Perhaps this is the right time for the RCMP to cordon off high crime GTA neighbourhoods and confiscate unlicensed weapons.

  25. Yessirree! Practice indeed. Once Global War. ….I mean, Climate Change gets into full swing.

  26. This looks like the Ice Storm of 1998 in Eastern Ontario and Quebec. That’s when they almost had to evacuate Montreal and when the power lines crumbled under the weight of ice on the power lines. They said the weight from one pylon to the next was the equivalent of hanging a mid-size sedan from the hydro wires! In our neighbourhood, with mature trees, we were five days without power, cooking in our wood-burning fireplace. There were huge piles of broken branches that residents picked up on their property and the city of Ottawa came with a wood chipper in the spring and chopped it all up into mulch. Most trees required arborists to remove the broken branches that hadn’t fallen to the ground. The countryside (outside the cities) went without power for a month or more. Good luck to the ‘centre of the universe’.

  27. Just went and picked up my father in law and brought him here.
    He was without power since day light but didn’t want to break camp.
    Never seen so many wires, branches and trees down ever.
    It’s pretty amazing.
    Most of it looks like the trees and branches are bringing the wires down.
    All the streets have branches and trees in them
    Full power and cozy in China Town.

  29. Priceless…
    Except here it is the OPP
    and they are afraid to even step foot in Caledonia.
    Piss themselves in Scarborough unless the Mayor makes some intros…lol

  30. C’mon folks.I’m no friend of Toronto or the Liberal government but this is a weather event, nothing more. Please don’t politicize it like the morons on the CBC website are doing.

  31. ” The ice-storm is a genuine emergency for people without power.”
    Give me a break.It is an inconvenience.
    The people have been without power for less than a day. If that is an emergency, then you may as well off yourself at the next opportunity, you are weak and a drain on the rest of us.

  32. Good one, “r”.
    Power was out here in central Etobicoke from 2:00 a.m. to 5:15 p.m. so congratulations to Toronto Hydro for the quick turnaround time (here at least). I’ll be phoning a compliment to them as soon as things calm down.
    No power lines in the front of our houses here, they’re all out back, so falling branches weren’t a power problem but four of my neighbours’ boulevard trees had branches fall off of them. (Most of the trees were maples planted in 1967 so they’re not small but not huge either.) I dragged three of them off of the road and one really big one off of the sidewalk. Our nextdoor neighbour’s small apple tree that hangs over our fence broke up to pieces so we went into the yard and cut off the offending limbs by hacksaw. A set of branches was hanging off of our telephone line, but it was fine once he cut off the limb. Bell TV is at 90% and internet is fine.
    Sorry to read about your spill, Mississauga Matt. I had a few near misses while sidewalk and driveway ice-chopping but nothing back or knee spraining, luckily. I hope that you’re well tomorrow.

  35. You’d think that if it *was* a genuine emergency then people would shut up about Rob Ford on their own – they’d be too busy dealing with the emergency.
    Maybe, just maybe, it means that the residents have learned to deal with the weather that happens regularly where they are – and without government assistance.

  36. As I sit here with a dram of Lagavulin, I’m thinking of Rob Ford.
    He’s holed up with a cool one or a scotch, warm and snug in the knowledge, that the HATER media is running in all directions at once….. over what?
    The weather.
    It only comes every year.
    Cheers Rob, we’re feeling warm, and fuzzy here to.
    Merry Christmas!

  37. It was an ice storm in Ottawa in Dec 1978 that ensured that I moved out west. I don’t mind -40 C temperatures as all that one needs to do is dress warmly enough. Having precipitation when one’s got a temperature just around freezing is no fun at all. It was a walk through downtown Ottawa during that last ice storm when I was walking under trees not knowing if the next branch that fell would be on me rather than in front of or behind me. Never got hit but decided there were a lot nicer places I could live that didn’t get frequent ice storms. Aside from the threat from falling branches there was also the interesting neurologic workout of attempting to maintain ones balance while walking on what was essentially a very long sheet of ice. Probably the only people who weren’t annoyed with this were orthopedic surgeons who likely paid down their mortgages by a significant amount during that ice storm.
    Given the propensity for Ontario to experience ice storms, one would think that a response to this would be to start burying hydro lines. Likely such a program would have been far less costly than the construction of absolutely useless bird blenders and would have allowed the population to have power during an ice storm whereas only the prepared who had bought generators would have power under the current system.
    Not much fun to have to live through but obviously non-functional bird blenders were a much higher priority to the watermelons than weatherproof electrical transmission systems.

  39. Loki, there’s a very long history here with respect to burying power lines. Toronto Hydro began to address this in the late 1980s with its plan to upgrade its downtown distribution system. At that time, it was still using the original turn-of-the-last-century 4 kV piano wire overhead. And downtown, a lot of the more modern underground cable was insulated with PCB.
    So the plan was to convert everything to much higher voltage, 28.8 kV I think, and put it all underground. They showcased the proposal, and that’s when the trouble started. Turns out a lot of folks understood that this would require a lot of digging and the usual mess involved with that. The objections poured in, particularly in the old City of Toronto, not so much the surrounding buroughs.
    End result was that ony the transformers would go underground, the wire stayed overhead because the cost of converting everything underground was simply more than the ratepayers would stomach. And the ratepayers didn’t want the backhoes ripping through their property just to bury some cables.
    It’s ALWAYS this way. Utility proposes an upgrade scheme to enhance reliability and everything deemed “luxuries” gets trimmed out of it. The situation was made worse in 1998 when Mike Harris repealed the old Power Corporation Act, dissolving the not-for-profit status of all the municipal utilities, making them for-profit corporations. Suddenly the municipalities could squeeze large amounts of profit out of their utilities, or sell them to reap a windfall. What might have been spent as capital upgrade got sucked into dividends to the municipal government to defer or reduce property tax increases.

  42. Well, a few points of conversation:
    – As you suggest, Ontario MEUs/EDAS have been engaged, as a matter of wide-spread tacit engineering and operational “standard”, in the elimination of 4kV systems for at least 25 years, in favour of higher voltage 13.8kV and 27.6kV systems. Some of that included installing underground plant, but much of it simply involved replacing overhead for overhead, due to cost (as your example suggests) and ease of access. The Toronto public debate you describe pre-dates the Energy Competition Act by at least ten years.
    – Even under the PCA regime, when shareholder demands for cost of capital payments were not an issue, the paucity of catastrophic failures due to weather militated against the benefit-to-cost ratio of burying extant overhead power lines; the financial benefit simply accrued to ratepayers in the form of a lower distribution component of the bundled per kWh rate regime then prevailing. If there were weather events that disrupted electricity distribution on a much more frequent and devastating basis, the answer in the 1980s Toronto illustration might have been different: but a once-in-decades ice storm, even if its impacts last for a few more days, as much as that is inconvenient to those without electricity, hardly justifies the cost of burying all overhead lines, even if the funds were available because the shareholder didn’t want them.
    – And the reality of those economics cannot be blamed on Mike Harris, as much as I agree with you that Mr. Harris’s government, along with all of its successors, made a miserable botch of the electricity file. The Energy Competition Act reads like a framework for a investor-owned industry (i.e. non-government), which is what Mr. Harris promised to deliver in 1995, and then failed to deliver.

  43. So now we have the worst of both worlds. Windmills and hanging lines. Hope the frequency of these ice/freezing rain systems don’t increase or it will get real expensive. Damn that global warming for deserting us. Would have been nice.

  44. cgh and David Southam, interesting points about the economics of burying power lines. IMHO, this reflects 1970’s thinking when it was far more possible for society to get along without power.
    In the 1970’s, a power failure was no big deal as we cooked with a gas stove, had lots of candles, and I did my programming with pencil and paper by candlelight. Now that I have a 1970’s supercomputer processing power in my laptop, I’m far more dependent on the electrical grid as my i7 laptop has a battery that will basically take it from one power outlet to another. Yes, overkill in terms of CPU power but very nice to have at ones fingertips.
    So we’ve become a lot more dependent on reliable electrical power and the options are:
    (a) bury power lines to prevent ice storm damage as well as protect against a Carrington event
    (b) equip every house with a natural gas powered generator which will immediately kick in if the central power fails.
    Likely I’ll be going to option (b) but replacing my incoming power with a generator which can handle the load I currently have would be about $10-15 K. Something I’ll do soon when I’ve saved up enough money for this SHTF option, but my guess is that it would cost less than $15 K/house to run all power lines underground in large metal conduits to newly built homes. Will have to see if a well shielded underground electrical distribution system will be Carrington event proof or whether the local connection to each house will serve as an antenna which will conduct the EMP to the remainder of the system.
    The problem with conventional risk analysis is that it ignores black swan events. While a Carrington event is a once in a century or two phenomenon, the effects on the power grid as it currently exists are so devastating that one should either plan for it or have a backup plan in effect. A backup plan would involve having a spare stock of transformers large enough to replace all of those blown by a Carrington power surge. No utility in the world likely has done this.
    Considering that CAGW has resulted in spending far more money on what isn’t even a black swan event, it would have been far more prudent to have spent that money on protecting the electrical grid so it could withstand ice storms and Carrington events. Instead we get windmills which don’t operate in ice storms because the designs don’t allow for ice imbalance on the blades.

  46. Agree and I too want to wish everyone a merry Christmas. Tomorrow will be too busy to play on the net.

  47. I live in midtown Toronto, where miraculously, despite downed trees on every street, we didn’t even have a flicker. I didn’t even know there was a problem until I turned on the TV on Sunday afternoon.
    Nevertheless, I’ve learned my lesson. Right after Christmas, I’m going to buy an uninterruptible pow

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