OTTAWA (CP) -- Almost a year after the great ice storm slammed Quebec, Ontario and parts of the Maritimes, Statistics Canada has produced a storm of numbers on precisely what went down.
More than 1,000 power transmission towers and 30,000 wooden utility poles, for starters.
Close to 1.4 million people in Quebec and 230,000 in Ontario without electricity. In many municipalities, power not fully restored for at least a week.
Approximately 100,000 people taking refuge in shelters.
More than 2.6 million people, 19 per cent of Canada's labour force, had difficulty getting to work or couldn't get to work at all.
It was the most disruptive and destructive storm in Canadian history, David Phillips, senior climatologist at the Environment Department, said in an interview Monday.
A month after the ice storm there were still 700,000 people without power, he noted.
It wasn't really a single storm, but rather three successive events that dumped as much as 100 millimetres of freezing rain on Central and Eastern Canada over the period Jan. 4 - 10.
By comparison, the largest previously recorded ice storms left some 30 to 40 millimetres of ice.
The storm covered a distance of more than 1,000 kilometres from Kitchener in southern Ontario to the Fundy coasts of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.
It sparked the biggest peacetime deployment of Canadian troops ever. Nearly 16,000 Armed Forces personnel assisted with emergency measures and restoration of the power grid.
Nearly one quarter of the country's dairy cows - 274,000 - were in the affected areas and many could not be milked because farmers depend on mechanized milking.
Here just an idea of what it was that happened