Were you living in the Montérégie in January 1998? Please take 5 minutes of your time to help us understand the health effects of the worst natural disaster in Québec history.
WHAT IS THIS ALL ABOUT? Between January 6 and 10, 1998 130 mm of freezing rain fell on much of southern Quebec leaving approximately 4 million people without electricity. The area south of Montreal (Montérégie) was the most affected by the storm. Electricity in this area was not entirely restored for several weeks. Project Ice Storm was established shortly after this natural disaster with the aim to determine whether the stress that pregnant women experienced during this natural disaster would have an impact on their unborn children’s development. Findings from 
our study suggest that the mothers’ stress experience affected a wide range of psychological and physical outcomes in their children. However, our Project Ice Storm cohort is not representative of the Quebec population. As such, we will examine health data obtained from the Régie de l'assurance maladie du Québec (RAMQ) and the Institut de la statistique du Quebec, and education data obtained from the Ministère de l'éducation et de l'enseignement supérieur (MEES) to determine whether there were any population-level changes in health and educational outcomes that can be attributed to exposure to the ice storm before birth. We will do this by comparing health and education outcomes for all children born in the Montérégie in 1998 to those of children born in the same administrative area in the three years before and after 1998, and to children born in two other administrative areas (Bas-St-Laurent and Capitale-Nationale) between 1995 and 2002. 
Our Project Ice Storm findings indicated that the number of days the pregnant women were without electricity and without home telephone predicted psychological and health outcomes in the children. For the larger, population study of RAMQ data, we need to associate every birth in 1998 to a postal code and to the number of days without electricity and without phone at that address. We were unable to obtain this data from Hydro-Quebec, so we are asking you, the people who lived or worked in the Montérégie at the time of ice storm, to help us fill in this gap. As such, we are asking individuals who were living in the Montérégie to assist us by completing a brief survey about their length of power and telephone outages during this crisis. These data will be combined with maps detailing the amount of freezing rain that fell during the crisis to create an index of stress severity for each postal codes within the Montérégie.
We thank you for your assistance.
Suzanne King, PhD and the Project Ice Storm team
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