Wednesday, December 15, 2021
In early January 1998, a five-day ice storm coated the Northeast and eastern Canada, downing power lines and leaving millions in the cold and dark for weeks.
On this day in 1998, freezing rain began falling across northern New England, upstate New York, and eastern Canada, and it did not stop for five days. Ice built up more than an inch thick on power lines, poles, and trees until steel towers folded and the wires came down by the thousands. At the peak, several million people were without electricity, some of them for a month in the middle of winter.
The danger was not the storm itself but the cold that moved in behind it. Homes that relied on electric or oil heat went dark and started to freeze, pipes burst, and people crowded into shelters or risked carbon monoxide from generators and grills used indoors. The recovery took weeks because the grid had to be rebuilt, not just switched back on.
The lesson is that a long extended power outage in winter is a heating problem first. A safe backup heat source, a way to keep pipes from freezing, warm bedding, and food that needs no cooking turn weeks in the cold from a crisis into something a household can ride out.
