This month of January, where everything collapsed

Photo Pierre-Paul Poulin
Mp pq’s Pierre Belanger was the minister of public Safety during the ice storm in 1998.

Pierre Bélanger

Sunday, January 7, 2018 01:00

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Sunday, January 7, 2018 01:00

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Now and always, every time I hear the sound of the sleet on my window, of images bubble to the surface, for a few brief moments. Twenty years later, they are usually pleasant, or at least devoid of strong emotions.

That remains for me-t-he of this famous month of January 1998 ? Images, indeed, because they were many and they marched to the cadence of those towers collapsing. They have begun to resemble those wonderful postcards from unpublished to quickly transform themselves into visions of despair for the people who were trapped.

Fears

I am looking to hunt those first hours, marked by expressions of great fear, in the face of a crisis quite unprecedented, and continues to evolve at a pace maddening.

The eyes of these ministers, deputies and mayors, seeking to be reassured so that all are aware that mother Nature has decided to follow a path which no one knows the outcome.

I can still see my reflection in the mirror, hoping that this is all a bad dream, of which all would like to wake up and for which nobody is prepared.

Photo archive

The minister of public Security, Pierre Bélanger, seen here in 1998, at a press conference
on a daily basis with the prime minister Lucien Bouchard, at the centre and the CEO of Hydro-Québec, André Caillé.

The face of these firefighters, police officers and installers, who are at work since several days already, often neglecting their own family, to save or at least restore a little the situation of this cause that seems lost in advance.

I remember the South Shore, all black, that I’ve crossed from night to the early hours of the crisis, and which gave me the fleeting of a devastated region.

I see all these houses yet intact, and which had become vulgar, empty shells, deprived of all its inhabitants refugees in temporary villages built in haste.

I think this cold weather, the absence of which has caused this chaos and all of whom now grasp desperately for the return prompt.

Army of volunteers

But I think especially now with solace, this army of spontaneous volunteers who is mobilized, and listening to the call of his prime minister, doing daily little miracles of solidarity and hospitality.

These same police officers who are no longer, in the space of a few weeks, neither blue nor green, but are members of a single cohort reassuring their fellow citizens door-to-door in this well-known triangle be damned.

I like to review this employee, who, like his colleagues returnees of different ministries, is pleased and proud to have been able to troubleshoot this to a fellow citizen in the lack of the most essential things.

I see him later, with a heavy heart, return to his official duties, who have never, by his own admission, managed to get this feeling so intense done his duty toward his neighbor.

It is these images which I will leave forever, who are dear to me, but that I never want to see again.

Yet, I often wonder and still, if next time there is, if we are really ready.

I like to think so and even more to believe it, but the doubt remains, or persists. Because the more the memory is distant, the more the bad advisor that is the reason economical suggests to us that this was after all only a bad dream that will never happen again. After all, it will say that nothing has really collapsed.

♦ Pierre Bélanger has been a member of Warwick from 1992 to 1998. He is now director general of the Fondation UQAM. He was the minister of public Safety during the ice storm.