Officials remember Ice Storm emergency efforts

Jan. 7—EDITOR'S NOTE — For the 20th anniversary of the 1998 Ice Storm in 2018, reporter Joe LoTemplio wrote this oral history of the historic storm. We're reprinting this article to mark the 25th anniversary of the storm.

PLATTSBURGH — Until the escape of two murderers from Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora in 2015, the 1998 Ice Storm of was undoubtedly the biggest local story of the past half century.

The trauma, intensity and the mystery of the Ice Storm are still felt vividly by North Country residents decades later.

"The hardest thing about dealing with the Ice Storm was the unknown," former Clinton County Emergency Services Director James King said, in reflection.

"Just when we thought we had a handle on things, something else would happen. You just didn't know what was going to happen next."

INCREDIBLY SLICK

The storm began late in the afternoon of Monday, Jan. 5, 1998, when a slight but steady rain began to fall, while temperatures played hopscotch with the 32-degree Fahrenheit mark of freezing.

By early evening, roads were covered in a thin but incredibly slick sheet of ice, making travel quite treacherous.

Numerous accidents on Interstate 87 north of the city backed up traffic from Champlain to south of Beekmantown. A house fire in Mooers went unattended as fire trucks responding to calls careened off the road. The home was destroyed.

MORE RAIN

On Tuesday, things calmed down a little, and highway crews were able to get salt and sand on the roads, making travel easier. Residents relaxed a bit.

No one seemed too worried about forecasts for a significant ice event. Most thought Monday's icy roads would be the worst of it.

But the rain continued to fall, with temperatures still around freezing.

A steady layer of ice began forming on trees, power lines and anything else that was exposed to the elements.

Those ice layers became thicker and heavier by the hour Tuesday night into Wednesday.

GETTING SCARY

Wednesday brought a third day of steady freezing rain, accumulating snow and biting wind.

By then, "you were feeling more stress and starting to realize we may be tougher than tough in the North Country, but it was more than we could handle," said Marty Burnett, Franklin County's volunteer emergency-services coordinator.

"Power was out, people were running out of gas, and it was cold to the point where it was getting scary. It was the unknown because this was something we'd never experienced before."

Residents rushed to stores to buy food, water, batteries, candles, fuel and all kinds of supplies.

Wednesday night, trees started falling, snapping violently under the tremendous weight of ice and creating a cacophony of crashes, cracking and crackling throughout the Champlain Valley and beyond.

FIREWORKS

Utility poles snapped, quickly taking down miles and miles of power lines and creating bright-blue explosions from utility boxes breached by the mayhem.

The commercial Route 3 corridor west of the City of Plattsburgh looked like the Fourth of July that Wednesday night as blue explosions occurred seemingly every few minutes.

"I remember standing on my porch and listening to the crack and crash of the beautiful trees that made Plattsburgh so pretty in the spring, summer and fall," said Daniel Stewart, who was a city councilor at the time.

"So much was lost to that storm, and the scars of it are still visible today when I visit Plattsburgh and see certain 'half trees' still standing."

IT WAS ALL ICE

By mid Thursday morning, almost all of Clinton, Essex and Franklin counties had lost power, and the ordeal was on.

The ice had paralyzed much of the region, as fallen trees, power poles and electric lines festooned roadways.

"Nobody was traveling," Essex County Emergency Services Director Don Jaquish said of the empty highways. "It was all ice."

Then, he was a volunteer deputy fire coordinator under Emergency Services Director Ray Thatcher.

King remembers everyone coming together quickly to deal with the situation.

"We had done a lot of training, and we had established an incident command system," King, now 75, said from his home in Keeseville. "Everyone knew what to do, and we just got to work."

NATIONAL GUARD

Those in the Northern Tier seemed to be hit the hardest, and there were desperate cries from that section of Clinton County for King to declare a state of emergency and get much-needed help from the state.

But protocol prevented him from pulling the trigger.

"There wasn't enough of the county affected, at first, for them to let us declare an emergency," he explained.

"Then, when the rest of the county was out of power, we declared it right away."

With that declaration came troops from the New York National Guard, who brought heavy equipment, generators and supplies and, most importantly, people willing to help.

King led efforts from the command bunker in the Center City, trying to communicate with first responders as best he could.

"People kept saying that they didn't know where Jim King was and he should be out so people can see him, but I couldn't leave," King said.

NEW RADIO SYSTEM

Gov. George Pataki made appearances throughout the region, with State Sen. Ronald B. Stafford always at his side.

"Having Stafford was a big help," King recalled. "He was able to get us a lot of assistance."

Clinton County had just installed a brand new radio system for first responders right before the ice storm, and it was put to the test.

"That system worked great. It never failed us," King said.

It was a different situation in Essex County.

"This was all before there was 911 service," Jaquish recalled. "Our radio systems back then were not good."

NORTH TO QUEBEC

Power was quickly restored in the City of Plattsburgh, where the MLD system was more compact and easier to access. MLD crews, with help from municipal power crews from across the state, had the lines back up and power flowing within three days.

With things pretty stable in the city, officials there could turn their attention to helping others.

Then-Mayor Clyde Rabideau organized a caravan of local volunteers to haul firewood north of the border to Iberville, Quebec, where powerless residents were desperate for warmth.

"I remember pulling up to the Canadian customs window at the Rouses Point border crossing in the first truck and telling the official who we were and what we were doing," Rabideau said.

"He flashed a big grin and waived all 90 trucks through without any stops or inspections whatsoever."

Iberville welcomed the U.S. contingent with open arms, Rabideau said, and after the firewood was unloaded, "an older lady asked a group of us into her small apartment, where she poured each of us a glass of port wine and toasted us in French."

Stewart, who would go on to become mayor in 2000, remembers the cross-border trip.

"That was a wonderful gesture and a real showing of how cross-border boundaries just didn't matter," he said. "What mattered was the human element."

Stewart said that gesture by the city inspired him to do a similar thing a few years later when he organized a caravan of mostly elderly citizens to travel over the border to receive flu shots when a shortage in the United States created strife.

DEATHS

Outside the city, where residents were served with electricity from NYSEG or Niagara Mohawk, repairs went much slower.

Farmers were desperate for power to return, for they couldn't milk their cows without it. Between 3,000 and 4,000 cows died due to mastitis brought on by the situation.

Without power for days, even weeks, neighbors joined each other in homes with wood stoves and gas grills. They emptied lifeless refrigerators and freezers and stuffed food in icy snowbanks.

Sleeping bags were hauled out from summer camping storage areas, and generators were fired up.

It was generators that led to three deaths in Clinton County and one in Franklin County, when people succumbed to carbon-monoxide poisoning by running generators inside their homes without proper ventilation.

Another person died from hypothermia, and one suffered a fatal heart attack while trying to cut up a downed tree.

"That was difficult," King said.

NO SLEEP

National Guard troops checked on the elderly and others throughout the region, and highway and fire-department crews went to work cleaning up the downed trees and utility poles.

In all, about 1,200 utility poles went down, and at least 70,000 people lost power, some for more than three weeks.

Luckily, King said, CVPH Medical Center in Plattsburgh had recently installed a massive generator.

"The hospital stayed up and running, and that was very important," he said.

Sleep became just a memory to emergency responders, who dealt with flooding and fires beyond Ice Storm emergencies.

King, who retired in 2005, got no shuteye that first week at all, but that was a small price to pay.

"Our mission was to keep people as safe as possible and do whatever we had to to make sure that happened," he said.

"We just went out and did it the best we could."

E-mail: jlotemplio@pressrepublican.com

Twitter: @jlotemplio