Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here. Our group post last week had me going through my photos of winter in Maine, and that led, inevitably to pictures of a three-and-a-half-day weather event that was unprecedented here in Maine. It took place a little over twenty-seven years ago.

The Great Ice Storm of 1998 affected eastern Ontario, southern Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and northern New York State. Freezing rain started to fall in some places on January 5 and was still affecting others until January 9.

The population of the entire state in 1998 was 1.248 million. Between 700,000 and 840,000 of us lost power, a third of that number for more than a week. Some homes didn’t have power restored for over a month. The cause was ice building up on branches and power lines. Anything over a half inch can be catastrophic. It averaged 2.3622″ in the affected areas.

our back yard with ice

our back yard with normal snow cover

Since transmission towers had collapsed and thousands of utility poles were down, Governor (now Senator) Angus King declared a state of emergency. Help poured in from all over. Utility crews from North Carolina were flown into the former Naval Air Station in Brunswick in military planes and escorted to the areas most in need of them by members of the Maine National Guard.

Local outreach made a big difference, too. Most towns set up warming shelters. Neighbors helped neighbors, sharing generators and food. There were even people looking out for pets whose owners had to leave their homes for lack of heat.

Shortly after the storm ended, commemorative T-shirts were available. The one I bought had a checklist on the back listing things we went “seven days without.” Power, showers, and coffee were included. I don’t remember the rest, but we were actually much better off than a lot of people in the state.

First came the unsettling crack of ice-laden branches breaking. Then our power went out, at 2:20 AM on the 8th. We lost our landline the next morning. I’m not sure we even owned cell phones back then, but we had a portable radio, a woodstove and plenty of firewood, a supply of water for drinking, washing, and flushing, and our camping gear, plus lots of candles and flashlights. We couldn’t take a shower but we could make coffee.

The TV went out along with the power and streaming wasn’t yet a thing. Neither was WiFi. I passed the time editing by hand (That Special Smile for the Bantam Loveswept line) and reading (Elliot Roosevelt’s Murder in the Blue Room and a friend’s manuscript). We ventured out to the Post Office on the morning of the 10th so I could mail out six ARCs of Face Down Upon an Herbal, which was published that April. We were in the grocery store, where they were using an adding machine to total up purchases and taking cash only payments, when the power in the village came back on. Everyone in the place cheered. At our house we had to wait until 7:40 PM, but we did some cheering then, too.

We pay close attention to weather forecasts here in Maine. Blizzard or ice storm, we’re ready for it, but I definitely prefer the snowy landscape of a normal winter.

fresh snowfall on the morning of February 1, 2025

Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett has had sixty-four books traditionally published and has self published others. She won the Agatha Award and was an Anthony and Macavity finalist for best mystery nonfiction of 2008 for How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and was an Agatha Award finalist in 2015 in the best mystery short story category. In 2023 she won the Lea Wait Award for “excellence and achievement” from the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. She was the Malice Domestic Guest of Honor in 2014. She is currently working on creating new editions of her backlist titles. Her website is www.KathyLynnEmerson.com.