Walking on ice

Montreal has freakish weather. Since coming here, I have encountered 30 degree heat in the summer, 40cm of snow, -20 degree cold, and wind chill that brings that down to –30. It gets so cold that the moisture on your palms freezes the moment you touch any metal door handles when opening doors and your breath freezes on your collars. But the most intense weather phenomenon has got to be freezing rain.

Basically, freezing rain occurs when precipitation starts out as snow. The snow passes through warm air and melts completely. It then passes through a thin layer of cold air just before it hits the surface. While passing through, it cools to below freezing point, but doesn’t freeze. The super-cooled rain drops then freeze upon impact with the ground.

Freezing rain hit Montreal overnight on Tuesday, 9pm, turning into rain on Wednesday morning, 4am, wrecking havoc in downtown Montreal. If you want an idea of how slippery it was, go take an ice cube from your fridge and hold it with 2 fingers. Not too difficult right? Then wet the ice cube, and try to hold it with two fingers. The freezing rain laid down a layer of ice all over downtown that was an inch thick. When it turned into normal rain, it conveniently washed away all the grit laid on the pavements and roads.

Roads had to be closed, bus routes were disrupted and some schools were closed. McGill wasn’t one of them, but I’ll get back to that later. Cars struggled to find traction on the slick surface, even on level roads. All of Rue University above Sherbrooke was closed as there were cars that were just sliding back down that road, which slopes upwards On Sherbrooke and University, a car floundered in the middle of the intersection while making a left turn. The driver had to keep revving his engine to keep from sliding back into the cars behind him, and a police officer has to slide over to push the car from behind just so it could actually make the turn. Up on Peel and des Pins, firemen had to set up ropes so that pedestrians could cross the road without sliding down the sloping roads. Pedestrians were slipping and sliding all around, some (including me) getting on all fours just to avoid falling down.

For those of you who have not been to Montreal before, McGill’s campus is partially located on an incline, and the Residences are located on top of a hill. It was a wonder that people actually bothered to brave the slopes of University above des Pins to get to school. And this is where the ranting starts.

Given the treacherous conditions, I have no idea why the McGill administration did not cancel classes for the day on Wednesday. Of the 800 – 1000 or so students living in Upper Residence, I have no idea how many decided to actually go to class. My friends who did told me that once you started down that slope, you just slid right down, and the only way to stop yourself was to fall. So fall they did. Almost everyone fell on the way to school, and my Prof for my 8:30am Calculus class came in late, telling us that he had fallen 3 times on the way.

If Rue University had to be closed until 11am because cars couldn’t get up, surely, the school’s administration could not have expected people to actually walk down the slope to their classes. And if all the roads leading to upper campus were impassable to vehicles, how did they expect pedestrians to be able to make it to class? Granted, it could be done, but at great risk to the students. The Montreal Gazette reported on Thursday that there were 14 minor bus accidents all over Montreal, and by 11am, the ambulance service had logged over 400 calls, twice the number it normally receives in a day.

Given that McGill has this habit of sending belated E-mails about class cancellations and the like, the very least they could have done was to send out a similar E-mail warning students of the conditions in the morning if they didn’t cancel class. Or they could have at least informed students of the road closures. It might have been a little late, but some sort of response from the administration would have been better than nothing. But there was not even a mention of anything when I checked the University website at about 10 that morning. It was as if the weather outside was completely normal. It was not. And we should have been told. The lack of any response, however uncoordinated and however late, is a indicator of shoddy, sub-par administration.

On Ave des Pins and Rue Peel, firefighters set up ropes to help pedestrains cross the road.