This weekend marks the tenth anniversary of the Ice Storm
– a destructive weather pattern than gripped the northern part of our region
for several days.
The images of broken trees and fallen power lines stayed
with us for many months after the storm passed.
Commentator Tom Slayton says the even 10 years later, the Ice Storm
still has an impact on him:
(SLAYTON) "Vermonters are used to bad weather in January
-blizzards and bone-cracking cold. But the ice storm of 1998 was different, and
somehow more ominous.
I didn’t really
think too much about it when the big storm first blew into town – I guess I’d
heard too many "storm of the century" stories. Montpelier, nestled down in the Winooski Valley, had been largely spared, but other parts of Vermont were not so lucky.
But elsewhere, ice
damage was heavy. Mountainside forests were a chaotic shambles. It took the
Green Mountain Club months to reopen all the trails that the storm had
barricaded. Power lines, especially over in the Champlain Valley were trashed,
and some families didn’t get electricity back into their homes for days. People
I worked with had to evacuate their homes, which had become little more than
nicely appointed campsites – no heat, no running water (hot or cold) no kitchen
appliances, no flush toilets.
The storm had
effectively sent a lot of Vermont
back into the 19th century – maybe the 18th!
I was happy that my
home was undamaged, still in the 20th.
A couple of days
after the storm, I drove over Appalachian Gap, and was shocked at how the ice
had trashed the high-level forests I saw there. It looked like a bomb had gone
off in the woods -several bombs, in fact. I drove through downtown Burlington and was saddened to see trees that I remembered as
old friends from my UVM days bent and broken, unlikely to recover.
But perhaps the most
disquieting feeling of all, in retrospect, was the uneasy knowledge that
something -something big and something new – was happening to the weather. It
was getting weirder – warmer and weirder.
Now, 10 years
later, the weirdness is much more obvious. Not only are winters shorter and
stranger – they’re more extreme. We’ve had snowless winters followed by huge
blizzards that dump three feet of snow overnight. Last December’s snow drought
is eclipsed by this December’s record snow, which may well be melted by next
week’s freak warm spell.
The forests trashed
by the big ice storm of 1998 have largely recovered. The power lines have been
reconnected. The back roads have long
been cleared and repaired.
But the gnawing
uncertainty that the storm brought us has not gone away; it’s gotten worse.
Our weather is
changing, we tell ourselves, wishing we hadn’t noticed. The uneasiness hardens
like ice in our hearts and refuses to go away."