By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, January 25, 1998; Page A28

A near catastrophe at the peak of the recent crippling ice storm was avoided when power to Montreal's water filtration and pumping system was restored after being cut for hours – a situation the city would have been ill-prepared to handle, local economists and officials said last week.

If electricity had not been restored to the system that evening of Jan. 9, residents of Canada's second-largest city would have been without potable water, and firefighters would have been powerless to battle any blaze that might have occurred during a widespread electrical blackout.

That would have forced officials to consider either evacuating the city or moving residents to facilities like Olympic Stadium, where water could be delivered by truck, said Jean Thomas Bernard, an economist at Quebec's Laval University who has been monitoring the province's response to the ice storm.

Fortunately, the city's one remaining link to the provincial electric grid held, and Hydro-Quebec was able to restore power to the filtration system after about two hours, and to the pumping station after about 10 hours on that Friday night. Even so, city residents were told to boil water for the next two days to kill any bacteria that might have entered the system while the electricity was off.

Bernard said that even though the storm was a once-in-a-century event, it will force provincial, municipal and power company officials to rethink their disaster plans and prepare for the possibility that a major city like Montreal could be stranded without basic services.

The water plant has no backup generator or power supply because, as a priority customer of Hydro-Quebec, officials assume electricity will always be available.

"Montreal came very close to disaster in terms of the water supply," Bernard said. "I am not sure we are prepared for a situation where Montreal would be hit for two or three days without power. . . . This was not in our state of mind. . . . I am sure that all the way from Hydro-Quebec to cities and governments there will be a major look."

Already, Hydro-Quebec, one of North America's largest utilities and a mainstay of the province's economy, has proposed a $500 million plan to add more distribution lines around the city and redesign some of its larger towers to withstand the type of storm that punished the area for four days.

"If you look at what has happened in recent meteorological changes, obviously [the power grid] is not secure anymore," Quebec Premier Lucien Bouchard said Wednesday.

The system crumpled under the weight of the ice, as tens of thousands of poles and hundreds of towers and pylons crashed and bent.

The end may finally be in sight for the thousands of Quebecers who struggled through their third powerless week. Hydro-Quebec estimates that customers still without power in the stricken Monteregie region south of the city will have at least temporary lines by early this week.

Permanent repairs will take months. Damage has been estimated at about $1.5 billion, a quarter of it done to the power systems in Quebec and eastern Ontario and the rest divided between damage to personal property and lost business and production. That makes it the most expensive storm in a country with no shortage of natural calamity, including two major floods in the last 18 months, one in Quebec and one in Manitoba, and deadly avalanches in British Columbia and Alberta.

The ice storm losses include animals frozen to death on dairy, chicken and fish farms, a maple sugar industry that might lose as much as 30 percent of its production because of tree damage, thousands of cars dented by fallen branches and major industries that shut down assembly lines as they lost power and later, ran out of parts.

Bernard said the analysis provoked by the crisis will go well beyond any study Hydro-Quebec might do on how to strengthen its power distribution system. Plant managers, for example, might challenge accepted wisdom about producing "just in time" for delivery, having been reminded their supply of parts and raw materials is vulnerable.