Speak of the devil

I was starting to feel a little nostalgic about disaster, listening to the retrospective coverage of Ice Storm '98--right up until everything started to fall apart again. The massive thaw of the last week presented its bill with hurricane force winds. The campus went dark, the network and phones went dead. The website was kerflooey (a technical term). The transmitter was running on generator. Power surges melted my computer. It was a classic case of "speak of the devil."

Fortunately Lucifer didn't hang around quite as long this time. And there were some lessons learned. When the land lines went down, the cell phones came out. When the campus lost power, parts of the network stayed up on generators, as did our transmitter shack. There were workarounds for almost everything, from getting audio to the station to getting cancellations and closings out to the community--laborious maybe, suboptimal, but workable. Without the example of 10 years ago we would have been down to tin cans and a string.

So thanks for sending in your recollections of Ice Storm '98. But maybe in the future, we should just remember in our hearts. Not that I'm superstitious.

Ready or not

It's been ten years since the Ice Storm (always capitalized) administered its mighty dope-slap to the North Country. If you can remember what healthy woods are supposed to look like, you can still make out the edges of the devastation when entering or leaving the region. It'll be another decade before all the debris has mulched back into duff. But good intentions decompose more quickly. Looking around the house now I see that we still have no heat source that doesn't require electricity, and that the battery stash has long been looted of anything containing an erg of oomph. The candles looked quite romantic burning down to nubs on the dinner table, and the canned goods supply is down to one portion of cream of asparagus soup and some ripe olives.

It may just be that constant vigilance is an oxymoron. Nervous fatigue sets in. How long can you look into every shoe and never find a bomb? How long before we rebuild on the floodplain or the coastline or the flank of the volcano? And if, somehow, we stayed prepared for disaster, would it be for the next one, or for the last one? I can remember when they decommissioned the public fallout shelters and disposed of all the stock. Half the North Country stored old baby clothes and sundry in sturdy brown barrels with a yellow Civil Defense logo on the side. Every science classroom was stocked with an almost-new Geiger counter. And I bet it's not that hard now to find a good price on a used power generator: "1998 Honda 2 KW, low hours, runs like new."

Share your received wisdom (if you have received any) from the Ice Storm of '98. Drop us a line at radio@ncpr.org.