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Happy 40th Anniversary for the real ice storm

posted 11 years ago by TheXmanCometh
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While I may be a day late, the real ice storm did start on the 16th of December in 1973.

There are plenty of good links out there if you want to find out more on the storm, but here are some of the better ones I have come across:

http://www.newstimes.com/news/article/Region-remembers-ice-storm-of-73 -97594.php

http://www.courant.com/entertainment/hc-winter-storm121673,0,794677.st ory

http://www.wethhist.org/articles-from-the-community/2011/01/dark-cold- courageous-and-angry.html

http://www.foxboroughhc.org/weather.html

There are several links to other web pages in the links above, but these are a good overview. Feel free to add others to this page in living memory of the storm.

[–] TheXmanCometh 11 years ago

I neglected to mention this 1973 home movie from Georgetown, CT which does have a quick ice storm peek at the 6:00 mark.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vHdskGyZmE

The storm did affect the area for weeks for a variety of reasons and I can see why this stuck in Rick Moody's head. New Canaan is just now getting natural gas piped into town--in 1973 most homes relied on oil or electric heat and were without heat for days on end unless they had a fireplace/wood stove. If you had propane delivered back then, you were probably the most popular house after the storm! And while some of us may have started a gas oven to take the chill off a house with no power, that wasn't an option to many who relied only on electric ovens.

Next, New Canaan has a large number of trees which fell onto power lines when coated with ice and the repair took days even with all of the crews trying to get power back. You can hit your favorite search engine, but this was also a problem for the town when Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012.

A couple of the links I included here have vintage photos of the storm.