By the second day an emergency ‘home’ at the Augusta Civic Center was opened and people were coming in by about twenty- five people an hour. There were many people who went to the shelters and they had many mattresses all over the floor as beds. Some older people had to be escorted out of their homes to either go to a shelter or go to a health facility depending on their health condition. While people were working on getting people to safe shelter there were over one hundred Central Maine Power line crews and many other tree crews and other cleaning crews about trying to restore the damage and clean up the mess that had taken place during day two.
Written by Morgan Rush
Academy Street ice damage, Hallowell, 1998
Hubbard Free Library
Ice Storm Facts
1. 1,000 utility and tree service workers worked 20 hour days to fix lines and clean up trees.
2. CMP had to restore power to over 250,000 customers
3. 500 CMP operators taking calls made 1.5 million transactions
4. More than 4 million people without electricity in the Northeastern US and Canada.
5. 110 CMP line crews and 150 units set out on day 3.
6. At dusk on day 3 of the storm 205,000 were still without power.
7. 2,800 shelters were ready for people without power.
8. There 20 cases of Monoxide poisoning.
9. Over 1,000 pylons collapsed in chain reactions under the weight of the ice.
10. Twenty-five people died in the areas affected by the ice, primarily from hypothermia.
11. Twelve more deaths and hundreds of millions of dollars in additional damage were caused by the flooding farther south from the same storm system.
12. Millions of trees were brought down by the weight of ice.
13. 35,000 wooden utility poles were crushed and crumpled by the weight of the ice.
14. Roughly 700,000 of Maine's 1.2 million residents were without electricity at one time or another.
15. Three weeks after the end of the ice storm, there were still thousands of people without electricity.
16. Damage to the power grid was so severe that major rebuilding, not repairing, of the electrical grid had to be undertaken.
17. The storm affected parts of Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and New York.
18. CMP paid $55 million in repairs.
Written by Sam Moulton and Nate Stahlnecker