Poultry Talk Ontario (pto.ca)

For those who are in and around the Ottawa area, they are announcing that it is the 20th anniversary of the ice storm. My first memory of realizing something devastating was beginning, happened during the night. I was living in Ottawa at the time and the power went out. I went to bed and suddenly woke up to what sounded like gun shots, they continued on and on so I went out on my balcony. I was six floors up and looking down I could see that the trees below were collapsing, large sections would snap off and crash to the ground. That was the beginning, everything went haywire after that.

At the time, we lived in an area that had fairly frequent power interruptions, and were fairly well prepared. My kids were 6 and 7 at the time. A week in, when I found out it could be weeks, or even months before we had power, we decided to stay with friends that had an old dug well. The hand pump was long gone, but we uncapped the well and drew water old-school, with a pail on a rope. Rigged up car batteries for radio and lights Studded tracks on the snowmachine, so I still had a safe "drive". Power was out at our house for a total of 3 weeks, we went home when it was restored. There's only so much beer, euchre I could take lol. Actually, my friends had kids of their own, and the little Spazzes were wearing my nerves thin. Other People's Kids (opk for short) aside though, we didn't suffer any devastation, or anything worse than minor inconvenience. The kids thought the whole thing, even the hard weeks of cleanup, was all a grand adventure. For me, it was kind of just another day at the office, only with ice. And a lot more beer and euchre.

Scary stuff.

We were without hydro and phone for 2 weeks, it took us a while to realize the hydro wasn't going to just pop right back on, and after that, it was basically a full time job to keep the wood furnace going, without the fan it had to be loaded slowly gently and constantly.
DH was still working, so brought canisters of water home every day to keep the horses cats dogs and people watered.
The worst part was at night, listening to the branches and trees breaking.
It took a month of chainsaw work to be able to walk to the back again.
Lost a full freezer of food.
It was a bit of a reminder that people used to live like that in the past and managed OK, not that I would like to adopt that lifestyle.

First part copied from the "Good Moring" thread because this is where I meant to post it originally:
We were without power for the better part of a month during the big ice storm. I was able to bathe at the gym at work because I had a membership at the time. One of the things I remember getting on my nerves was the number of people on the elevator complaining that they were sick of hearing about the ice storm. We were hauling in water to flush our toilets, etc, while most of these complainers hadn't been without power for more than a few hours. At worst they had to do without overnight and part of the morning, and they still had flushing toilets and running water.

I agree with you about the sound of trees breaking being heartbreaking, OC.