The ice started at nine. By midnight it has taken down eleven lines, and the outage board on the wall of the dispatch trailer looks like somebody spilled a box of red pins on it.

You're the overnight dispatcher for Tamsin Valley Electric Co-operative, second winter on the desk. You have three two-person line crews, one spare pole-mount transformer, and a phone that has not stopped.

The board, at midnight:

• Harrow Creek feeder: breaker locked out at 22:48. Six of the eleven outages are downstream of it, including the volunteer fire hall and Cedar Bench Elementary, which the regional district opened at ten as a warming centre. The school's generator is rated for about four hours.
• Hoek dairy spur: separate line. Darren Hoek called at 23:30 to say his transformer "went off like a shotgun."
• Dunmore Road: a cedar across the line, halfway up the hill. One customer with a medical flag, Pedersen, W., age 81, home oxygen concentrator. His daughter called from Calgary at ten past twelve. Backup cylinder: "maybe six hours."
• Three others: a cabin, a well pump, and a hobby farm that has called four times about its heated chicken waterer.

Ray, Marguerite and Tomasz are sitting in their trucks, waiting on the radio for somewhere to go.