Mountain Road was one of the hardest hit areas in Falmouth. Gordon Chibroski/Press Herald
When I think of the ice storm, two things come first and prominently to mind.
First was enduring a week without running water. We could manually flush by taking off the porcelain toilet tank lid and pouring buckets of water into the toilet tank. But that procedure meant filling many plastic gallon milk jugs at the town’s outdoor freeze-free spigot and conveying them back to the house over ice-covered ground in the cold and dark – after working all day.
Second in my mind was the hellish cannon-like crashing sounds that occurred night after night. Our house was in the woods, surrounded by trees.
All night long we would lie in bed listening as the trees fought valiantly to stay alive. A small branch or larger limb would give up the fight, sometimes with a cracking sound. Seconds later, after the wood fell down from many dozens of feet in the air, there would be a very loud crash as the ice-laden limb hit the ice-covered ground. Added to the crashing sounds was the never-ending banging of gas generators off in the distance, running all night long for the lucky few (not us, then or now) who owned these loud and dangerous machines.
The trees that suffered the worst were the birches who had grown straight, thin-trunked and tall over years in their efforts to get at life-giving sunlight. In the ice storm, these birches were weighed all the way to the ground, where their crown-tops became welded tightly to the ground ice. Day after day they were locked there, straining to get upright but with no escape. I managed to free a few birches with my ax, chopping their crowns free from their ground-ice prison, to let them rise back to the sky.
– Ray Wilson, Cumberland
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Connie Hoffman, foreground, and Rita Darling, both of Fairfield, try to rest at the emergency shelter at the Colby College Fieldhouse on Jan. 9, 1998, the day after most of Maine began icing up. David Leaming/Kennebec Journal
When the storm struck, I was living and working as a teacher in Readfield. My 16-year-old daughter and I lived in a small house that was heated by wood. As the tops of trees and large branches snapped off, falling onto power lines and into the roads, and transformers atop the poles blew up, filling the air with bursts of light and sounds of explosions, it felt like being in a war zone.
When the rain stopped and the ice had done its damage, we ventured out of the house to a bizarre landscape. The skyline was filled with the jagged outline of trees snapped off. The road was blocked with the shattered trees and downed power lines.
It was wonderful to witness the community working together to ensure everyone was safe and their needs were taken care of. As it became clear that the area would be without power for a long while, efforts to help one another increased. One area of town that had its power restored much sooner than others was the community school. It was established as an emergency shelter for the towns served by the school. Most people did not sleep at the shelter, but rather used it to gather with others, get a meal or have a shower.
I worked with volunteers from our staff and members of the Lions Club to make muffins and coffee in the morning for folks who stopped in to get a shower in the morning before heading into work in Augusta or areas where power had been restored. Parents with small children came for lunch and playgroups. Line workers also stopped in for lunch or coffee. The cafeteria was filled with a mixed group of people sharing stories and resources. This went on for over two weeks. Towards the end, the Red Cross came in and took over making meals.
The ice storm created a great deal of physical damage but nurtured a community spirit that helped individuals and families get through a stressful time.
– Patty Stanton, Charleston
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The sound of crashing trees kept Edna Swain awake Jan. 8 in Pumpkinville, an independent-living village in Cornish. Swain and other residents lost power at 2 a.m. Jan. 9, and Swain opted to stay in her apartment. That was a choice thousands of Mainers had to make as the ice kept building up and power was lost to much of the state, in some cases for days, in January 1998. Gregory Rec/Press Herald
My downstairs neighbors in Bethel left to stay with friends in Portland. The weather was eerie and depressing; day after day of gray skies with temperature just below freezing and no sun. I stayed in the apartment for about four days, thinking I could tough it out since the outside temperatures were not that cold.
One of the things I remember is how much I missed hot water. It was cold so I needed hot food and beverages, but the only thing I had that would produce hot water was a fondue pot and Sterno containers.
After four days, I could feel myself becoming slow and sluggish and just wanting to sleep, and I began to be afraid of creeping hypothermia. When a friend who ran a motel in town that still had power offered me a room, I jumped at it. After four days, she told me I’d have to vacate because she had reservations for skiers.
For the first time in my life, I had no idea where I would be sleeping that night.
By then power had been restored to my street, but the individual wire to my house was also down, and individual fixes were at the bottom of the list. The big renovated barn where we worked putting out a biweekly newspaper had some sleeping accommodations. I went down early and slept in the barn for a few days. It was a long strange drive. The devastation was heartbreaking.
After the paper had been sent to the printer, I came back to Bethel and stayed at the home of an older couple who I knew slightly from my work at the land trust. I don’t remember how this came about, but they were kind and I was very grateful. Once a day I would go back to my house on Paradise Hill Road, pick up the mail, make phone calls – remember landlines? – and wander through the cold rooms. By then some sunny days had returned, and the living room could be almost pleasant. Sometimes I would wrap up in the down sleeping bag and nap on the couch just to feel like I still had a home.
One afternoon, 14 days in, I was lying there, having just woken up from a nap, and I heard the furnace click on. The lamp beside the sofa also came on, a signal from an almost-forgotten life. And I cried.
– Kathy MacLeod Hooke, Portland
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During the ice storm of 1998, I was 26 and on a 10-day Outward Bound snowshoeing and dog-sledding trek in the western mountains of Maine. Needless to say, we had no idea what was going on with the rest of the state, without cellphones or even a radio to contact the base. It had a big effect on our trip, though.
We trekked all day and stopped to set up camp fairly late in the evening. We built our two shelters, which consisted of a tarp strung between trees, with snow walls that we built under the lower edges of the tarps so that any rain would run outside of the snow walls. We cooked dinner, debriefed the day and, totally exhausted, started to get ready for bed.
At that point, our instructor, Tracy, noticed that one of the trees we had tied one of the tarps to was leaning a little more than it had been a couple of hours earlier. Tracy made us move the shelter. We argued with her, told her that it looked fine – we were so exhausted. Tracy insisted, so we moved the shelter and finally got to sleep. Sure enough, in the middle of the night the tree that had been leaning became so covered in ice (as was everything else) that it fell right onto the spot where our shelter was. It would have crushed the half a dozen of us.
The next day, I went to get my gear and discovered that my pack was encased in a boilerplate of ice. We decided to stay put that day and try to dry out the wet sleeping bags over the fire with the expectation we’d have a dry day to recover and then continue. Well, all day we tried to dry those bags, only to have any water that evaporated out of one side of the bag replaced by rainwater coming down.
All we knew was that we were having some really bad weather; we had no idea what was going on in the rest of the region. We found out later that the trip leaders nearly decided to intercept us on the trail and bring us back to base; in some ways, we had it easier in the wilderness – we were already set up for no power or heat. We were all shocked to get back to “civilization” to find it looking like a war zone.
– Martha Bracy, Damariscotta
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When the ice storm hit, I was living in Nashua (which never lost power), but my elderly parents were hunkered down in their home in Orono. Power went out early in Orono, and snow and ice blocked their driveway and had drifted against the doors, leaving them stuck. By the evening of the second day, they were really cold and almost out of firewood for the fireplace – their only source of heat. By the third day, I knew they were in trouble. With no quick end in sight, I headed north.
The trip was bizarre. First was the big sign near Kittery, saying “Maine Turnpike closed.”
I kept going. The full scope of the storm hit me when I saw the sign outside Kennebunk saying “No gas north of Portland.” I suddenly realized that the stations had gas but couldn’t run the pumps without power. The turnpike wasn’t fully closed, but it was down to one icy lane. Ice covered everything.
I got to Orono and got inside. My mom was shivering badly under a pile of blankets and quilts. My dad had burned some old furniture, but it was still in the 40s inside. I went out to the garage, found the electrical supply cable to the furnace and cut it. I installed a plug on the end going into the furnace, ran an extension cord out to the generator in my truck and fired it up. My mom said that the sweetest sound she ever heard was that noisy furnace kicking on and hot water gurgling into the radiators.
Later that day, I took the generator to a neighbor’s house. Robert Frost coined the phrase: “Good fences make good neighbors.” As I left, those neighbors told me that sometimes good neighbors make warm houses, too. It’s what we do in Maine.
The other thing I recall so clearly was that Pat’s Pizza in Orono was open and cooking! They had several big propane tanks out back and a small generator to keep a few dim lights on. Pat Farnsworth was moving fast, carrying hot pizzas to hordes of hungry folks, some of whom had been stranded without the cash to pay for them. Perhaps Robert Frost should have mentioned pizza, too.
– Bill Jeffrey, Scottsdale, Ariz.
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