The Ice Storm of '98 - Photos

Here are the promised photos from the Ice Storm of '98. It took a bit of work to scan them from negatives.

After a week long ban on driving, I was able to go down to check on the house and found the following scenes of destruction, beginning with the view from the end of the street:

On the property are 6 Manitoba maples, 1 cherry and 1 large pine tree. The Cherry being rather spindly suffered no damage, followed by the pine which towers over the house. The pine suffered some minor damage on the growing tip only, despite the fact it must have been totally covered with ice.

The Manitoba maples were the worst hit. Manitoba maples grow quickly and prolificly but are one of the softest of the hardwoods so don't have any great amount of strength in their limbs.

This tree is on the south west corner of the property:

These two trees were to the north of the house. They were removed two summers ago after one lost a trunk at ground level during a wind storm and the other, right next to the house was found to be hollow (I'll post a picture in another blog - just incredible!)

The front porch you see here is no longer there. Another victim of the ice storm. When I first came down to the house there was a 1 foot thick slab of ice on the roof of the porch. The roof subsequently collapsed and the whole porch was removed later that Spring when I found the porch to be fairly rotten (this is what happens when you build wood structures too close to the ground without pressure-treated wood!).

Here is another view of the two trees that were on the north side of the house.

The other two maples on the lawn suffered extensive damage also.

Another close-up, showing the extent of damage:

I was able to cut up most of the wood lying on the ground with my McCulloch Pro Mac 10-10 chain saw, but the stuff hanging from the trees and getting rid of all the small branches required a tree service, costing $2700, none of which was covered by my house insurance or any disaster aid. I did get several years' supply of mediocre firewood though.

The long term effects of the Ice Storm can still be seen in forests in East Ontario. For a number of years, bent branches and stunted trees could be seen everywhere, particularly from the air. Some of the damage that wasn't apparent at the time of the Ice Storm showed up years later during wind and other storms.