By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, January 16 1998; Page A15

Six hundred miles north of here, the crushing force of rivers in northern Quebec and Labrador sends a surge of power through a network of thick transmission lines that ring this city, forming the core of what local officials advertise as one of the developed world's lowest-cost electricity grids.

Today, just outside this rural town, the towers and transformers that feed high-voltage electricity into low-voltage lines that connect to people's homes are a tangle of twisted metal and splintered wood. Large and small lines are draped low to the ground or hang loose, snapped altogether.

Along the road, in either direction, poles are either broken or stripped of their lines.

"There is no power coming in, and no power going out," said Jacques Chaquette, a Hydro-Quebec worker helping with the repairs around St.-Cesaire, which lies within the "triangle of darkness" southeast of Montreal. More than a week after a storm dumped unexpected -- and perhaps unprecedented -- quantities of ice on eastern Canada, 170,000 homes in the triangle are still without power and are not expected to have any for at least five days.

It has long been an article of faith among Quebecers that the system built by Hydro-Quebec over the years to tap the power-generating potential of the province's immense water resources was a dependable source of power. It was cheap, and it was independent of the political vagaries of oil, the environmental costs of coal or the financial burden of nuclear energy.

But last week's ice storm also showed how vulnerable that highly centralized system is when events don't cooperate. Reliant on five high-voltage transmission lines that encircle Montreal and are built to withstand about two inches of ice, the system reached near-blackout conditions when a storm dumped double that amount on southern Quebec.

A few degrees' difference in temperature either way and the resulting rain or snow would have classified last week's weather as normal. A few degrees' difference in the storm's direction, and it would have fallen on largely uninhabited land.

But the freakish deluge hit the province's power system at its most strategically vulnerable point, causing a crisis that engineers, financiers, risk managers and armchair quarterbacks will be analyzing intensely in hopes of avoiding a repeat.

About 300,000 homes and businesses throughout eastern Canada remained without power today, some for the 10th straight day. Officials say it will be two weeks until power is restored to some areas, and months before reconstruction is complete. At the peak of the problem, 1.4 million of Hydro-Quebec's 3.4 million customers were without power.

As many as 20 deaths are also being blamed on the storm from fire, hypothermia and other causes, and in parts of Quebec a deep sense of emergency persists. Though Montreal has had its power restored and begun returning to the routines of business, worries about price-gouging merchants and about elderly people stranded without heat in freezing homes continued to occupy thousands of civil and military officials helping in the crisis.

Because so many Quebecers, accustomed to the province's cheap power rates, rely on electricity not just for light but for heat, hot water and cooking as well, a power outage here has a deeper impact than it might elsewhere.

That fact will weigh heavily when Hydro-Quebec officials begin discussing whether last week's damage requires longer term improvements to their system or was simply the type of natural fluke that can't be fully guarded against. The costs of burying transmission lines, or diversifying the type and size of generating stations and transmission lines, may be too high to justify any course other than rebuilding a system that currently lies in ruins.

"We are talking about something that is above the risks that would occur in 100 years, and in the meantime there are benefits" to the system as it is currently designed, said Renee Arsenault, a spokeswoman for the utility. "Do we believe that once in 200 years we might get another ice storm? . . . We are going to rebuild it the way it was."

The rare nature of the storm is becoming even more clear. A combination of sopping-wet air from the south and freezing temperatures in Quebec turned what would otherwise have been a comparatively harmless blizzard into what climatologist Dave Phillips said today was, if judged by its weight, conceivably "the heaviest ice storm in the history of the planet."

"This belongs in the X-Files, not our archives," Phillips said during an interview on a Montreal radio station. In the 50 years since Environment Canada -- the federal agency for which Phillips works -- started keeping records, the heaviest recorded ice storm left about two inches; this one dropped two to three times that amount.

Whether the power system needs to be bolstered or not, the damage caused is easily seen along the country roads outside Montreal, and particularly in villages like St.-Cesaire.

Hydro-Quebec's Arsenault said that preliminary figures show the utility will have to replace as many as 30,000 standard utility poles, 100 large metal towers that carry the largest lines and perhaps 500 smaller metal towers.

"Some of these towers were bearing five times their weight in ice," Arsenault said, and under conditions like that "you'll never be fully protected."