When the power goes out, your neighbours are the grid | Canada Voices

We woke up without power on the last Saturday in March. It wasn’t unexpected. The forecasts had grown steadily more ominous in the preceding days. A “significant weather outlook.” A “potent storm.” A “hazardous event.” But in Trent Lakes, a couple hours’ drive northeast of Toronto, it arrived softly that morning. A few downed branches, a shimmer of ice on the road. Hydro One said the power would be back by noon.

Now that parts of Canada are consumed by wildfires, it’s hard to imagine that only months ago a sudden freeze was the danger. But by early that afternoon, the temperature had dropped and more rain moved in. The trees sagged under the weight of the accumulating ice. My wife and I decided to drive into town to grab a warm meal while we still could. There were about eight or nine of us inside the only local restaurant still open, hunched over plates and beers, the storm outside growing. As we paid our bill, the lights flickered, then failed. The server kept bringing food out in the dark.

On the drive home, the rain picked up. The tick of ice pellets against the windshield grew louder. The wipers dragged uselessly over the frozen glass. A sense that this wouldn’t be an ordinary storm began to creep in.

By the time we got back to our road, a massive cedar had fallen across it. We sat in the car with the headlights pointed at the trunk, unsure of what to do next. I opened the door, and heard the crack of branches falling around us. Then a voice called out from a nearby porch.

“You’re not getting through that tonight. Better come in for a beer.”

That was Rob, a neighbour a few roads over, someone we’d only briefly met before. He waved us inside. As we shook off our coats, flakes of ice clinking to the floor, his wife Mary handed us each a can of Busch. With their generator humming in the background, we retreated to the basement. We played a few rounds of pool, swapped stories about family, the neighbourhood, the slow renovations we’d each been working through. The storms that had rolled through before.

We talked about the 2013 ice storm in Ontario, which left more than a million people without power and caused hundreds of millions in damage. Back then, it felt like a rare disaster, but that’s not true anymore. Canadian research shows that, owing to a changing climate, storms like that one are becoming more frequent and intense – and experts at Environment and Climate Change Canada predict that freezing-rain events will increase across the country in the coming years.

As we chatted, though, we still didn’t know what lay ahead for this storm – or how important our neighbours would become. When it was time to go home, Rob insisted on driving us the final kilometre. We’d parked in the driveway next door and his truck sat on the other side of the fallen tree. We climbed in and slowly rolled down our darkened road, the headlights cutting through icy archways of bowed branches. Every few seconds, one cracked and dropped around us. We thanked Rob before getting out, adding that we’d check in again soon.

Inside, we flicked on our headlamps, tried to reassure the cat and crawled into bed, thinking the worst was behind us.

It wasn’t.

That night, we hardly slept. A tense, steady thunder of rupturing trees echoed throughout the night. All around us, the forest was breaking apart.

By sunrise, the destruction was clear. The forest canopy was gone. Power lines lay tangled and coiled across the road. Mature trees had collapsed or stood wounded, their limbs torn away. Tree debris was scattered, some of it driven deep into the earth, rising up like spears.

“I was out early Sunday morning on my deck, and for 20 minutes, there was not a second of silence,” Trent Lakes Mayor Terry Lambshead later told me. “It was just limbs busting off. It sounded like shotguns. And the tinkle of freezing rain falling on the ground all around us … I’ve never heard anything like that in my life.”

The havoc went far beyond Trent Lakes. Hydro One said nearly a million customers were affected. It called the storm “generational.” The Ontario Energy Board described it differently: a “high-impact, low-frequency event.” It’s jargony, yes, but closer to the truth. These storms aren’t so rare anymore.

In 2022, a derecho – a type of windstorm so powerful it can be mistaken for a tornado – tore through Ontario in late May. It snapped hydro poles like kindling, peeled roofs off barns, flattened silos. I remember watching a canoe lift straight into the air, spinning like a leaf before crashing back to earth. I remember rain falling so hard it stung. We lost power for seven days. The next morning, my wife flew south for work, but not before the poison ivy she’d caught spread to the bedsheets. Somehow, amid all that, the cat caught fleas. We chalked it up to a once-in-a-lifetime fluke.

But now, only three years later, here we were again.

For the next few days, we were trapped at the end of our road. Trent Lakes declared a state of emergency. So did neighbouring communities. But the temperature climbed, the ice began to melt, and alongside our neighbour Trish, we started clearing the road. Chainsaws and handsaws moving in tandem, we cut through cedar, birch and maple to open just enough space to squeeze a vehicle through.

The next day, we ventured out. Dodging snapped hydro poles and live wires, we headed for a gas station after another neighbour gave us the scoop: No jerry cans, cash only, $30 max. The line of idling cars stretched for kilometres. We had enough in the tank to keep going, so we skipped it and tried for groceries instead.

Mercifully, the store in town had power. Even better, the shelves weren’t picked over. It felt like a pandemic-era supply run, minus the panic. There were tired faces, but also civility, humour, quiet determination. And toilet paper.

Back home, the support network kept growing. Trish left for a long-planned trip to New Orleans, and we took over caring for her two cats and her dog. Our neighbours Donna and Rainer were off visiting family in Germany. Their Generac kept their house running, so while we were already tending to their plants, we started showering there, too. Dave and Marianne, the other year-round residents at the top of the road, kept the entrance clear and the generators running.

We became a loop of tired greetings, patched roofs and steady solidarity. Online, the community Facebook group filled up with offers of extra generators, brush-clearing updates, simple check-ins. Even the wildlife began returning to rhythm. A tree had crushed our bird feeder, but we rigged it back up and scattered seed near the edge of the forest. Chickadees, nuthatches and squirrels returned. So did mallards, raccoons, mourning doves. Everything seemed hungrier. Braver.

On a calmer day, I slipped out for a paddle and spotted a brown mound in the reeds. At first, I thought it was a bear. Or maybe, somehow, a manatee. It didn’t make sense. Then the shapes came into focus: beavers. At least eight of them, piled together on a muddy ledge, fast asleep. Their lodge was underwater. The forest had been fracturing around them for days. I floated silently, watching from afar. One stirred, sighed and tucked deeper into the pile, as if to say: We’re tired, too.

It was around Day Six that something in the freezer began to liquefy and seep out. We bagged up the remnants and I drove to the dump. At the gate, the attendant commiserated. “I’m trying not to think about my deep freeze,” she said. “I’ve got a whole moose in there. Head included.” The dump waived fees for storm-related waste. A small mercy.

Around the same time, the hydro trucks began to pour in, from across Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick. At the peak, 4,800 crew members were on the ground. I waved at so many my arms got sore. When they made it to our road, my wife rushed outside to greet a worker surveying the damage. Startled, he jumped back. “Whoa!” he shouted. “I’m just making sure no one’s dead down here.” His tone was dry, but the concern was real.

Hydro One later told me their crews received gestures of support across the region. Warm drinks, handmade signs, kids’ notes taped to poles. “Thank you for reminding us why we’re proud to be an Ontario company,” their spokesperson said.

The experience left Mayor Lambshead, who logged more than 2,500 kilometres driving around Trent Lakes to check on residents, reflecting on preparedness. “We tell everybody to be ready for 72 hours. And then we have one that’s nine days long,” he said. “That’s something that we took out of this. Maybe you should be ready for longer outages now.”

As freezing-rain events increase in frequency, Environment and Climate Change Canada is expanding its Rapid Extreme Weather Event Attribution system to better analyze storms like this one.

Utility regulators are also starting to respond. Last month, the Ontario Energy Board rolled out new rules requiring electricity distributors to improve alerts and communication, including providing restoration estimates within four hours of damage assessment and regular updates afterward.

It’s also encouraging utilities to conduct “vulnerability assessments” to gauge how infrastructure might hold up under extreme weather. The goal is to strengthen the grid before disaster strikes, not after.

That same ethos is present in academia, and it’s not limited to utilities. In the climate-adaptation literature, the kind of neighbourhood response we saw in Trent Lakes is called “community-based adaptation.” The idea is that the safety net in a crisis isn’t always infrastructure, but relationships. Resilience, researchers argue, is built in the spaces between people, in trust and local knowledge.

A 2022 study in the journal Ambio found that what matters most in moments like these is the strength of connections within a community. It’s what makes someone share their generator, or knock on a neighbour’s door before dinner.

But you don’t need a study to understand how these types of storms leave their mark. They change how you think about risk. They redraw the line between emergency and everyday. They remind you of what a good neighbour really means.

After ten days, the power came back. But the work hasn’t stopped.

One recent morning, over coffee and mini muffins, our road gathered for a neighbourhood meeting. We talked about how to split the costs of road maintenance. About snow clearing, re-gravelling and how to prepare for the next storm.

Then we got to work. We spent the day hauling brush, sawing through snarls of fallen limbs, freeing logs pinned under larger trunks. Some of our neighbours are pushing 80. But everyone was out there, handsaws and all, shoulder to shoulder, helping to restore the forest, as best we could.

That night, Trish posted a video to her Instagram showing the results of the day’s work: the brush cleared, the road open again, the evening sun fading through the trees. It had been a long day, but a good one.

“Grateful for my neighbours,” she wrote. “Starting to see the light.”