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| Trees on the University of Vermont campus in Burlington badly damaged by the Great Ice Storm of 1998. |
Just the usual January chill, though with less snow on the ground than usual, part of a mild winter.
The winter of 1997-98 was mild, too, temperature wise. But it did bring Vermont, and much of rest of northern New England, parts of New York and especially Quebec one of its biggest disasters on record.
That disaster was ice.
Yep, time flies. It's the 25th anniversary of the Great Ice Storm of 1998.The storm lasted from January 5 to 9. During that time period, it was responsible for 16 deaths in northern New England and New York, and caused $1.4 billion in damage in 1998 dollars. (Adjusted for inflation, the cost is $2.5 in current money).
To my knowledge, the ice storm is only one of two billion dollar damage storms that has affected Vermont. The other billion dollar disaster was 2011's Hurricane Irene.
Remarkably, Vermont wasn't the most afflicted region. Ice accumulations in parts of northern New York and souther Quebec reached an incredible four inches. But Vermont was surely badly affected. In Vermont, the worst ice accumulations amounted to two to three inches in the northern Champlain Valley.
Generally speaking, during ice storms, you start to see minor trouble with trees and power lines if ice accumulations reach a quarter inch. Once you get to a half inch, you're getting in trouble. Large areas of northern Vermont had one to two inches of accumulation.
The disaster was created by what was in essence an atmospheric river from the Gulf of Mexico - a train of deep moisture that ended up colliding with a layer of dense cold air from high pressure over northern Quebec.
This setup lasted for four days. During that time, the warm air was forced to rise up over the layer of cold air near the surface. It was a relatively thin layer, so rain falling from up above didn't freeze until it hit the ground. Sleet would have been bad enough. Freezing rain was exponentially worse. Especially this much.
Rain and freezing rain from January 5 5o 9 amounted to 3.52 inches, including 2.11 on January 8 alone. That amount is about normal for the entire month of January. Numerous towns along and north of Route 2 reported more than four inches of precipitation from the storm, an incredible amount for a winter storm.
At the time of the ice storm, Green Mountain Power had 83,000 Vermont customers. About 40,000 of them lost power, some for more than a week.
For those of us who still had power, the whole New England power grid had to be rejiggered. In Quebec, which was hit even harder than Vermont, massive Hydro-Quebec transmission towers collapsed under the weight of the ice.
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| Front page of the Burlington Free Press, January 9, 1998 |
This cut off much of New England's power supply from Canada. Engineers had to do a quick switcheroo to increase power supplies from south of the region.
The days during the ice storm were pretty surreal. The ice devastated some towns, while leaving others unscathed.
At the time, I lived in Richmond and worked at the Burlington Free Press. It just rained in Richmond. A lot. But not a bit of ice accumulated on anything.
As I reached French Hill on the way to Burlington, the ice-free landscape suddenly turned into a frozen, awful scene of drooping, breaking trees and snapped power lines all the way to downtown Burlington.
Oddly, the main roads were not especially ice covered and were not overly slippery. Jim Cantore was camped out in the parking lot of Staples Plaza, reporting the storm for The Weather Channel. You know you're in trouble when extreme weather fan Cantore is in town.
As I worked in Burlington after dark during this crisis, blue power flashes flickered in the sky as power lines and transformers broke. Each breaking tree sounded like a gun shot, and there were a lot of them. It really felt like a war zone.
Those falling trees were dangerous. A man died in Colchester when a large tree fell on his truck as he was driving along Route 7. While reporting on the storm in Colchester, I was interviewing officials in the parking lot of the town offices when a large tree branch close by snapped, bounced off the power lines and crashed to the ground next to us.
We decided to continue the interview indoors.
The Champlain Islands were cut off, with too many fallen trees blocking the roads to gain access. Cattle died as they could not be milked easily without electric power. Sugarbushes were decimated from the southern Green Mountains to the Canadian border and well beyond.
The tree damage saddened me the most. Across New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, 17 million acres of forests were damaged, including close to a million acres in Vermont.
Between one fifth and one quarter of the affected trees were severely damaged or killed. So many trees collapsed or had many of their branches sheared off. Or they just collapsed entirely. The damage was apparent for years afterwards.
I remember the sense of relief I felt on the evening of Friday, January 9. After an afternoon of wildly out of season lightning strikes and more collapsing trees, the temperature abruptly spiked above freezing. Water from melting ice poured off the trees, and remaining branches began to spring back into their normal positions. The storm was over.
Even now, if you look closely, you can see trees with a spray of branches that launch from a point roughly halfway up the trunk. That's where new growth started in the subsequent spring after the ice storm.
To this day, when I hear forecasts of freezing rain, I fret a little bit that we'll see another round of tree and forest devastation. After all, the weather has gotten weird with climate change, and 1998 seemed to be a turning point. Luckily, all of the ice storms we've experienced in the past 25 decades after that storm have been super mild by comparison
ICE STORM AND THE YEAR 1998
The year 1998 turns out to be a bit of a watershed year in terms of climate, both locally and in the world in general.
The '98 ice storm set the tone for the weather year in Vermont. It turned out to be the wettest year on record, with 50.42 inches of rain at Burlington. (That record was eclipsed in the even more stormy, destructive year 2011 when 50.92 inches accumulated).
In 1998, disastrous floods struck Vermont in June and July, a tornado swept through parts of Bennington County in late May, and what had been until recently the biggest December heat wave brought Vermont temperatures into the upper 60s.
A big El Nino helped fuel the stormy 1998 weather both locally and worldwide. The El Nino boosted world wide temperatures. That year turned out to be, at the time, far and away the hottest year on record for the globe.
The temperatures and disasters of 1998 helped focus the public on the dangers of climate change. 1998 was billed as a preview of what climate change would look like.
Indeed it was. It's gotten a lot warmer (and arguably stormier) since 1998 locally and across the world). The year 1998 is no longer even in the top 10 list of world's warmest years. All of the top 10 years have been since 2010. Data for 2022 isn't in yet, but almost everybody expects last year to join the top 10 warmest list.
The year 1998 also used to be listed as the warmest year on record in Vermont. However, since then, six years have been even warmer in Vermont than 1998, including 2022.
Though we haven't seen anything anywhere near the severity of the 1998 ice storm in the 25 years since, weather events have gotten more extreme. We've seen an increase in record breaking heat waves and more frequent floods. Two storms in December each cut electricity to about as many Vermont houses as did the 1998 ice storm.
We probably won't see another 1998 ice storm anytime soon, knock on wood, but the weather and climate are in some respects more dangerous than they were a quarter century ago.
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