Reply #51: Either the ice storm of 1998, or freaky winter of 2001.

[TheWraith]

I think that it was 1998--my memory is hazy at the moment--but we had a huge ice storm. I live to the east of Buffalo, NY (City Motto: Please Don't Mock Our Natural Disasters), so we get some heavy snow every so often, but not usually a lot of ice. This was a LOT of ice. It didn't take out any whole trees at my house, but it did a huge amount of limb damage there and elsewhere. Power was out for something like 60 or 70 hours, it was so bad. At first, you could sit there and hear the limbs creaking and clattering. Then they started to come crashing down every few minutes. In the end, there was barely a space in the yard that didn't have branches on it--not just a few branches, but wood stacked three or four feet high, that you had to detour around and find the low spots to cross. It took weeks to clean up.

2001 was even more weird. It had yet to even frost for the first time. The weather was great, sunny and in the upper 60s or low 70s. I was outside doing something, and I paused for a moment to watch my neighbor on his all-terrain vehicle, pulling his Christmas tree up the road. That was December 17th, 2001. Next week, we received 90% of an entire winter's average snowfall, about four feet in 5 days.