Ice Storm Leaves Northeast In Dark Slow-Moving System Brings Flooding, Fatalities To South

An ice storm that cracked tree limbs and glazed roads knocked out power to millions of people in the Northeast and Canada on Thursday, while the same huge system brought violent weather and flooding to the South. At least 15 people died.

“I’d rather be buried in 10 feet of snow!” Tricia Rollins hollered over the roar of a chain saw that removed part of a huge tree that crashed onto her front lawn in Augusta, Maine.

The slow-moving system, which had hit the southern Plains earlier in the week, brought high wind, at least one tornado, lightning, thick coastal fog and snow as well as ice and rain. Eight people died in flooding on Wednesday and Thursday in the Southeast, including five in one Tennessee county. In Canada, the ice storm was blamed for six deaths.

The power outage numbers told the story: At least 220,000 customers lost electricity in Maine, 800,000 in eastern Canada, nearly 100,000 in upstate New York, 43,000 in New Hampshire and 10,000 in Vermont. The number of people affected easily translates into millions - an estimated 3 million in Canada alone.

Central Maine Power spokesman Mark Ishkanian called it “major, hurricane-type damage.”

A 38-year-old Vermont man was critically injured when a falling tree struck his pickup.

In Augusta, Maine, the state capital, residents were awakened shortly before dawn by the crack of ice-laden tree limbs that plummeted to the ground with a roar. At times, the sky lit up with the flash of electrical transformers shorting out.

In the South, the rain tapered off by midday, but the effects of all the water that the storm had dumped since Tuesday were still there. Schools were closed, roads were blocked by mudslides, and rivers were over their banks from Mississippi to Virginia.

The dead included a motorist whose car was swept into a creek after he got out of his stranded car, and a 5-year-old girl who wandered into a flooded ditch, both in Alabama; and a 62-year-old woman in Kentucky who drowned when she fell off a foot bridge into a creek.

In Carter County in far eastern Tennessee, five bodies were found in flooded streams Thursday. Helicopters were used to rescue people from trees and rooftops, and some 500 people were forced to evacuate their homes.

Bad news awaited some who returned home when the storm let up.

“One family went back and found their house in two halves,” said Jane Harris, a spokeswoman for the American Red Cross, which opened three shelters.

The storms cap a week that has seen temperatures well above normal along much of the East Coast. El Nino, the warming of water in the eastern Pacific Ocean, gets some of the blame.

The warmer water pushes a southern jet stream - a high-level wind that usually crosses the Gulf of Mexico - into a more northerly path. It brings warm, moist air up the East Coast and keeps cold Canadian air from going as far south as usual.

In Easley, S.C., four people were treated at hospitals late Wednesday after a tornado destroyed several mobile homes. Thunderstorm winds knocked down trees and power lines in Camden, S.C.

Winds near 60 mph flipped a tractor-trailer in Wilmington, N.C., on Thursday, and western parts of the state reported as much as 13 inches of rain in 24 hours.