>>>> To quote Peter Gabriel..."I go swimming,swimming in the water...."
 >>  JE> if you can get that zipped file down here to me, I can post whatever
 >> needs to be in here, upon request.
 >> Ok Jeff... E-mail and the phones are ok here,it is the AC that
 >> is flakey as hell.
 JE> Been watching.  Didn't know exactly where you were, but got a better 
idea,
 JE> now.  Hope it all 'blows over' soon.
 Jeff it blew over (for now....) but now we have snow dumping on top of the 
frozen everything,making driving in rural areas a mess. YUCK..
 There are still many people with no hydro in some parts of Eastern 
Ontario,the
Ottawa Valley,and parts of West and East Quebec.
 Some may not get full hydro service 'til later this or next week.
 This storm was one of the worst in Candian history so far.
 Hydro/telephone poles,trees,transmission line towers,amateur towers and even 
some commercial broadcast towers all collapsed under the weight of the 
freezing rain or snapped like tooth picks.
 Amateur radio was and still is the only link out for some communities,but it 
is getting better as phone service is slowly restored.
 The Canadian military is out helping hydro crews and we even have some crews 
here from other Ontario cities and even New York state in the area.
 We had real some sick people out there stealing the portable generators from 
homes and even some Bell Canada phone sites,making things dangerous for those 
who rely on those generators for their heat and phone service.
 Thankfully those sick ones are far from the norm as everyone pitched in to 
do what they could with whatever they had to help.
 Amateur radio has really proved itself to be the community lifeline in many 
Ontario and Quebec towns and cities that had their phone services and hydro 
trashed.
 Our local amateur effort was huge,covering a wide area from Ottawa west up
the Ottawa Valley,east to the Ontario Quebec border and south to the US 
border.
 Emergency plans relying on cellular phone systems were trashed when the cell 
systems became overloaded with calls from those who had no regular telephone 
services,so amateur radio was the only means to get messages out in some 
cases.
 Amateur radio was on the air within hours of the emergency being declared 
nd
mainly active here in the Ottawa area from the Cumberland Emergency Radio 
Group at the #1 Firehall in Cumberland. (a small mainly rural area just east 
of Ottawa that was very hard hit from the start)
 Amateurs in some rural areas lost all their antennas and went mobile,others
went so far as to yank local repeaters out of their sites and move them to an
emergency shelter to use them after the antennas were lost or trashed.
 A huge effort on the part of the amateur community in Ontario and Quebec to
provide communications for those who had none.
 I have never been through anything like this before Jeff and it was a big
eye-opener to see what could be done with what little you had.
 For a time we lost a repeater reciever east of Ottawa,so I sat on simplex on 
the input of the main emergency net repeater on 2m while listening to the net 
control on the 440 output of the repeater,relaying stations that could not 
fully make the repeater.
 I had to make two trips up the tower to knock the ice of the antennas so I 
could do this and at times the ice was over 2 inches thick on the booms.
 The only antenna I lost out was the HF trapped dipole when a trap broke last 
Friday so I count myself lucky.
 I guess all the long playing around on simplex finally paid off when the 
repeaters all seems to go fuzzy with ice on their antennas.
 I'll send you a ZIP file by E-mail this week of those file sI was posting 
now that the hydro has gotten a bit more stable.
 >> What did we do to deserve all this mess?
 JE> Blame it on "El Nino" ;-)
 Nah.... blame it on the politicians not making enough hot-air..
--- GoldED 2.42.G1219
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