The Silver Thaw Of '72
The year 1972 blew in with one of the most devastating acts of nature Hydro had ever faced in the Lower Mainland. To the old-timers who had experienced the great storm of 1935, there were a lot of similarities. Both storms hit on almost the same date: January 21 in 1935 and January 20 in 1972. Bob Sharman was one of the many Hydro employees who pitched in to clean up the damage caused by the 1972 ice storm. Bob was already working with a line crew in Agassiz-the epicentre of the storm.
It started on a Wednesday night. The day before we had a slight bit of an ice storm over in Agassiz, and we'd been out on that. Then on the Wednesday night, half of the line crew went bowling-we had a bowling league on Wednesday nights. We came out of bowling at 9:00, and it was slippery, so we all decided the safest place to be was down at the Legion. After a couple of drinks, what happens but Carl Battell comes walking into the Legion looking for his line crew. We couldn't get out of it, so we all went to work.
Out in the bush the old poplar trees were cracking off and snapping like sticks because they were frozen and loaded up with ice. You'd look across there, and they were just levelled, the whole field. We worked through the night doing repairs, 16 hours, and then went home to sleep.
It wasn't that cold, actually, because an ice storm occurs at right about 32 degrees Fahrenheit. It has to come down as rain and freeze on contact. Normally, if they know there is a storm building up, they overload the transmission lines so that the wire will go up a few degrees above the environmental temperatures. They had ice storms in the Valley pretty near every year in a minor way. They might only last an hour or so. But this one had lasted for over 24 hours. My wife, Dorothy, and my daughter went out at eight in the morning with an umbrella up, waiting for the bus. It never showed up, so they came back in, but they couldn't get the umbrella down because it had a sheet of ice on top.
Next day, Hydro sent up some more men to us from Surrey. The ice storm only affected Agassiz, Chilliwack, and not much in Abbotsford, because we had most of the Abbotsford crews up in Chilliwack. I made up a crew and we set out from Agassiz to Seabird Island, trying to make it up to Ruby Creek, because one of our poles had fallen across the CPR line there and they couldn't run the trains. Then we heard that the 500-kV line from the Bennett Dam was out. They couldn't figure out why or where, because it was still snowing and blowing and ice, and they couldn't even fly in with a helicopter. We were driving along after dark, and just before we got to Seabird Island we couldn't see any wire up above. And that was because it was down on the road-we were driving over top of it! So I radioed in and I said, "I think I may have found out your problem." Every tower was down for five miles.
It's hard to believe that those steel towers would crumple like that. They looked like somebody had taken a fist and just scrunched it up like tissue paper or something. A bunch of matchsticks.
Gerry Bramhill and his fellow line workers were also sent out that night. He remembers the difficult conditions on Seabird Island, where poles and transmission towers had come down.
We were trying to climb poles and using chisels and small hammers to chop our way up. We had to chop the ice away so that we could get our spurs in to climb the poles. The ice was two or three inches thick. As you were going up the ice just kept coming-and it was pouring ice rain. We chopped our way up the pole and chopped the ice off to get back down.
To Warren Byrnell, who was working in power dispatch at the time, it was as if part of the system had disappeared-and Hydro had to find a way to keep the lights on.
Up in the Agassiz area, the big lines from the Peace River just evaporated from the system. The only high-voltage line to stay on the system was the 360-kV line from Bridge River to Rosedale and Rosedale to Ingledow Substation. They had an awful job to synchronize it back into the system, because it had never happened like that before. Duncan Stewart and I went in to work early for an afternoon shift-purely by accident-and didn't leave until the next morning.
When you lose major transmission you have to start offloading customers. You start with businesses, because you don't have the power to supply them and you can only get so much from Bonneville. Actually, what happens is you have to get them to start offloading, taking themselves off on an orderly basis. So we had to contact these big customers like Hooker Chemicals and ESCO and so on. The last to go are the residential.
Hydro's Industrial Sales staff, including Jim Watts, Bill Dickinson, Bob Brassington, Walter Grey and George Barnett kept up daily contacts with the large industrial customers to keep them informed.
Hydro had been a member of the Western Systems Co-ordinating Council (WSCC) since 1967, which allowed BC and 14 states in the American West to help each other out in case of emergencies. Instead of the type of domino effect that had knocked out the entire eastern seaboard in 1965, power started flowing north from the US immediately. By Thursday evening, Hydro started bringing in crews from Vancouver Island and up country. Mike Morris was in Nanaimo at the time.
On Thursday nights we always went to the Quarterway Pub to cash our cheques. So we were drinking some beer and Dick Reay, who was the supervisor, came in and said, "You guys are going to Chilliwack." We said, "Oh, get off it," and he said, "You're catching the 11:00 p.m. CPR ferry over there." We still thought he was kidding, but we were on that ferry. They said it had to be bucket trucks, but we didn't realize why until we got there. You couldn't climb the poles, they were frozen so hard.
We went over with Chuck Preston, Bill Manson, Cliff Steadman, Paul Sheepwash, and Jack Weeks and stayed in the hotel on Young Road. We just about froze to death when we went in there, because there was no power. I remember Chuck Preston saying, "This is the first time I slept with my work socks and underwear and everything on."
Matters were made worse when an avalanche knocked out a 500-kV transmission tower eight miles from Squamish. But by having the line crews work overtime, receiving surplus power from Alberta and neighbouring American utilities, and running the Burrard Thermal, Port Mann, and Georgia generating stations at full throttle, Hydro was able to avoid major brownouts or blackouts.
During the crisis, Hydro's Information Services also worked overtime. Jim Sexton, Neil McKelvie, Trevor Collins, and Bill Chatterton all worked the phones to keep the media and the public well-informed. Meanwhile, metropolitan Vancouver and Fraser Valley customer service and trouble centre staff handled a deluge of calls.
The situation remained critical for a week, but the public and bulk customers alike responded by reducing their electricity use. Eight days after the storm, links with the Peace were partially restored. The crisis was over, and for several nights thereafter, the lights in the Hydro headquarters blazed out a pattern with a huge "THANKS" written across the top floors of the building.
