The soldiers are clearing away forests of dead trees, evacuating the seriously ill, setting up field kitchens, rebuilding generators and providing security in blacked-out areas.Lack of power hasn't simply meant no lights or heat but, in many cases, no water, no petrol (because the pumps at service stations are out of action), nowhere to buy food, no postal deliveries and, sometimes, no phones. Hospitals, full past capacity, are running off generators, surgeries have been cancelled and the blood supply is critically low.On Day Six, tap water was declared unsafe to drink. We were supposed to boil the water for five minutes before drinking it: a cruel irony for those with electric stoves. Since the beginning, CBC radio has been broadcasting survival information 24 hours a day, advising listeners to sleep as many as possible in a tent pitched inside their houses to conserve body heat. I now know too how to cook off a car engine, burn nail polish remover for heat and make a candle out of a potato.Central Montreal is beginning to struggle back to normality after parts were blacked out for nearly a week, but police are still patrolling the area to prevent looting.

Entire blocks remain closed off, and the vast majority of trees in the city have been damaged, if not completely destroyed.Things are far worse for the million or so Quebeckers in the "Triangle of Darkness" just across the river from Montreal, who have been told it will take weeks to turn the heat back on. The province resembles a war zone, with homes and cars crushed by falling trees and farm animals dying by the tens of thousands.People from across Canada are sending firewood, and the railways are trying to use locomotive engines to generate power for frozen towns, but local people too have been doing their best to help. The Rolling Stones may have cancelled their concert here, but the Montreal Symphony Orchestra is playing free in shelters.After dozens of unreturned calls to the Red Cross, the city and provincial authorities and a range of emergency relief numbers, I finally went to my local shelter in Ville St Laurent. This part of Montreal is the most multi-ethnic municipality in the country, with nearly half of its inhabitants born outside Canada. Most come from countries where a police officer knocking on your door and telling you to leave home implies a destination far less benign than the local community centre-turned-shelter. Many left extremely reluctantly, and were distraught when they arrived at the shelter.At the height of the blackout in Ville St Laurent, over 400 people were sleeping on mats on the floor of the community centre.

I was put in charge of two rooms reserved for families with infants. Most were mothers and children - fathers stayed behind in cold apartments to ward off looters.In one room I had an Algerian mother with her seven children under 11; a Vietnamese mother and her baby; a Ukrainian father, mother and baby; and an Irish grandmother, mother and infant. The other room was even more crowded, consisting mostly of an extended Chinese family. No one slept very well, apart from the Algerian mother who took a Valium shortly before lights out.The starkest moment came during an afternoon shift at another shelter, normally a school, that had taken in some men from a nearby home for the mentally ill. No one had seen "the boys" for a while, so I was sent to try to find them and make sure they were all right. I found them in the school library, enjoying an afternoon of videos. Or, to be more precise, one video: A Clockwork Orange.At least some people were making the most of the disintegration of civilisation..

OETZI is home. Six years after his kidnapping, the world's oldest Italian traversed the Brenner Pass on Friday morning, strapped to a stretcher in the bowels of a freezer truck. Seven Austrian police vans escorted him out of the country, a helicopter kept terrorists at bay. The final lap of the journey from Tyrol to South Tyrol was guarded by the Carabinieri. No passport checks barred the column's progress, because frontier controls in this part of Schengen Europe have been abolished. But, if the Ice Man's recent history is anything to go by, a border between Austria and Italy still exists, for ever sustaining enmity and prejudice that would not have been out of place in the days Oetzi roamed the Oetztaler Alps some 5,300 years ago. Discovered in September 1991 by German ramblers, the mummified corpse was instantly claimed as its own by the German-speaking world.

An Austrian coroner from Innsbruck, the capital of Tyrol province, was sent up the mountain 10,000ft above sea level. While he worked meticulously on the death certificate, scientists were prevented from making a proper examination. By the time the experts could take a good look, souvenir hunters had already helped themselves to a few bits, and the thawing corpse was sprouting mould.Oetzi was dispatched to the freezer in the cellar of Innsbruck University that was to have been his final resting place. The past six years, however, have been anything but tranquil. Almost from the outset, Italian nationalists took it into their heads that the corpse had been found on their side of the border."Nonsense," replied the Austrians Another group of experts set off with measuring tape.