10th Anniversary Of The Big Ice Storm Of January 5, 1998

Times Argus
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Article published Jan 6, 2008
Recollections of 1998 ice storm haven't melted yet

By SUSAN SMALLHEER Staff Writer

It's the sounds that people remember 10 years later: The eerie racket of trees snapping under the weight of inches of ice.

"Trees were breaking that were the size of your body. It was the sound of cannons," said Doug Rose of Ludlow, who almost lost his livelihood as a sugarmaker to the Ice Storm of 1998.

Former Burlington Mayor Peter Clavelle saw most of his city go dark for days after the storm, and its tree-lined streets permanently altered.

"I remember standing outside and hearing the trees cracking and the sparks flying as the limbs fell, and the transformers exploding," said Clavelle. "It was pretty bizarre. It was bad, and it got worse quickly."

The Ice Storm of 1998 caused millions of dollars of damage in Vermont, and ravaged close to 1 million acres of forestland, about 20 percent of Vermont's landscape, according to Steve Sinclair, Vermont's director of forestry. The storm wreaked even more havoc in Canada, and in parts of New Hampshire, Maine and New York, where people were without power for weeks. According to some estimates, the damage totaled $3 billion.

Massive power pylons, transmitting electricity from Hydro Quebec, crumbled, disrupting power flow to Vermont and other states, as well as Quebec. The storm was blamed for 50 deaths. One Vermonter is believed to have died because of the storm a year later, from injuries he sustained when an ice-laden limb crashed into his car.

In Vermont, the rainstorm struck on the night of Jan. 7, and the initial damage from thick layers of ice hit the next morning, a Saturday.

When ice-heavy limbs began ripping down power lines on Jan. 8, life was swiftly returned to the 19th century: no lights, no central heating, no running water. Towns surrounding Lake Champlain and elevations over 1,500 feet were hardest hit. Many Vermonters' lives didn't return to normal for days, and in some cases weeks.

Utility linemen struggled with the Herculean task of rebuilding the electric delivery system. In some cases getting to the downed lines was difficult in itself as thickets of broken trees blocked the roads.

Farmers struggled to milk their cows, and then worried whether milk trucks could make it to their farms. Sugarmakers watched years of work destroyed. (See accompanying story.) And families stayed home and tried to keep warm by hovering around woodstoves or ovens.

A 'war zone'

Tom Buckley, the customer service manager for the Burlington Electric Department, has clear memories of the devastation the day after the storm.

"I've never seen anything like it. The first night, I remember how surreal it was. It sounded like a war zone almost," said Buckley, who spent three days and nights hunkered down at the department, working with customers who had lost their power and needed help.

"Things were covered in at least a half-inch of ice. There was the constant popping and snapping of limbs, and flashes from utility transformers, it was surreal," said Buckley, who said that about 90 percent of all of Burlington Electric's customers lost power at one time or another.

"Chunks of the city would go out and we'd get them on and another chunk would go out," said Buckley.

In the end, Burlington Electric had to replace 40 percent of its above-ground distribution system. During the post-storm siege, Buckley, who lives in Westford, 14 miles from Burlington and only six miles east of Lake Champlain, stayed in the city. When he finally made it home, he discovered the storm had missed the town.

But cross another hill, he said, "and you were right into this maelstrom of damage."

Ten years later, Albert Kinzinger, a lineman with the small, 4,000-customer Swanton Village Electric Co., hasn't gotten over the trauma of the aftermath.

"How bad was it? I'm trying to forget it. I've never seen anything like it before or since," said Kinzinger, who had taken his daughter to the Burlington airport for a flight to Switzerland on that fateful Jan. 7. It started to rain on his drive back to Swanton.

"We got home around 11 p.m., and I got my first call at 1 in the morning, a tree had come down on a line in the village of Swanton. I don't think I got home for two days after that," said Kinzinger.

After he tended to Swanton's troubles, Kinzinger helped Citizen's Utility in Grand Isle County.

The trees were so bowed over by the weight of the ice, the road was like "a tunnel," he said.

Dave McFadden was in charge of 70 utility workers for Citizen's Utility, which served some of the hardest-hit areas of the state, including the islands of Grand Isle County. He remembers ice three or four inches thick.

"I was in Isle La Motte 14 days straight. The National Guard was all over the town, and line crews from Virginia. We started at the center of town and worked west. The National Guard was tree-trimming and hauling fuel and bringing generators to homes and doing whatever they needed to do. It was a massive effort on everybody's part," said McFadden, who lives in Alburgh.

Most farmers had generators, and many people had them too, he said. "My neighbor went to New Hampshire and came back with six, I think," he said.

"It's the worst storm I ever saw, without a doubt," said McFadden, who first worked for Citizens and then for Vermont Electric Co-op, which bought Citizens in 2004.

Of the 70 people under his supervision, 34 came from Virginia Power. "They came all prepared with 14 bucket trucks and they even brought their own mechanic," recalled McFadden.

McFadden said he was a tad jealous of the visiting crews. "They all stayed in Burlington and had movies and beer," he said. "I came home to no lights and no water. It wasn't a whole lot of fun. I don't think I washed my face for seven days."

McFadden said there was a blessing: After the freezing rain and ice, temperatures were moderate, and much of the ice melted, making repairs and cleanup easier.

But one night temperatures hit 10 below zero, and it snowed, burying power lines lying on the ground, he said.

Tree crews helping with the cleanup blew up a woman's house in Isle La Motte, he said. A tree they were cutting fell on the woman's house as she was baking something in the oven. The tree broke the gas line, shooting the gas into the house.

"It exploded and burned the house down. Luckily she survived," he said. "It was one of the most scary things."

Leon Berthiaume, general manager of the St. Albans Cooperative Creamery, said most of the farmers in the region had their own generators to milk the cows and cool the milk. But getting the milk back to the cooperative didn't always happen on time, and many farmers had to dump milk when they ran out of storage.

Getting generators to those who didn't have them was a priority for the coop during the storm aftermath, Berthiaume recalled.

"We needed to minimize the impact to herd health and other businesses tried to assist in terms of financing to purchase generators," he said.

He said in Grand Isle County, 30 farms, members of the co-op, were particularly hard hit by the storm.

"The Vermont National Guard, the utilities, truck drivers, everybody came to the forefront," he said. "They worked through just about everything."

Fifty percent of Green Mountain Power's customers lost power, according to spokeswoman Dorothy Schnure, who estimated that 40,000 customers were without power at one time or another. Everyone was back online in about a week, she added.

Schnure said the power companies saw the storm coming, but nothing adequately prepared them for what happened.

"The days leading up to it, we saw what was happening in Canada," she said, noting that advance planning is much more widespread now in the Vermont utility world.

Green Mountain Power, which serves much of Chittenden and Addison counties, brought in 100 out-of-state line crews, "which is huge," she said.

Back then, she said, customer service reports weren't immediately computerized, so employees in GMP's "war room" had to sort stacks of outage reports. Now, everything is electronic, and outages are dealt with more systematically, she said.

Most of Central Vermont Public Service Corp.'s service territory wasn't hit as hard. The company sent its linemen to help other utility service areas once it had taken care of its own customers in Addison County.

CVPS spokesman Steve Costello said he was on his way to Middlebury when the storm hit. In the space of 100 yards, the wet road turned to sheer ice, he said.

"There's so much more sharing among utilities and weather forecasting has gotten much better," said Costello. "We're light years ahead of where it was when the ice storm hit.

"We've certainly had a lot of practice," he said of CVPS' recent storm history. "Frankly our preparation and planning has gotten dramatically better."

Some forests and vistas are still recovering. The federal government provided $3.5 million in assistance for municipal planting projects and homeowners who faced with massive forest damage. But recovery was slow for some sites.

Mount Philo State Park, for example, is considered to be the poster child of the storm. The park was closed for a year as state crews cleaned up the damage, as virtually every tree overlooking Lake Champlain was damaged, according to Sinclair, the state's forestry director.

Still, Sinclair said he sees a silver lining to the crystalline storm.

"From an ecological standpoint, it certainly increased public awareness of Vermont's forests, and certainly urban forests. Those city streets don't have the shade and beauty they used to," he said.

Contact Susan Smallheer at susan.smallheer@rutlandherald.com.