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The reporting and photographic staff of The Keene Sentinel take readers into the heart of the ice storm that in December 2008 cut off electricity to more than 400,000 homes in New Hampshire and sparked an emergency response of historic proportions. The focus is the Monadnock Region, which sustained the most concentrated brunt of the storm, and where 12,000 homes lost power, some for weeks.

A key theme: The storm was about more than ice. It was about the community coming together. It was about massive forest destruction and startingly beautiful sights - "the Beauty and the Beast," as one Sentinel photographer put it. The storm was about transformation, as it changed the face of the Cathedral of the Pines in Rindge. It was about physical danger to humans during the storm and months afterwards. It was about the advancing professionalization of disaster recovery. It was about the lasting effect on fauna and flora, and the prospect of forest fire danger down the line. It was about the single largest recovery effort ever mounted by New Hampshire's electricity utilities, which brought in repair crews from all over North America. It was about the uneven economic impact of disaster and the government's many months-long effort to help in the recovery.

The narrative, accompanied by striking photographic images, is presented in three chapters - The Storm, the Aftermath and Lessons Learned - and closes with a checklist for homeowners for reference in future disasters.

Excerpt from the Introduction:

In government ledgers, the event is knows as FEMA-1812-DR, for the 1,812th disaster to which the Federal Emergency Management Agency was called into action. But most folks around here remember it as the ice storm.

Some people saw it coming. Here's how Sentinel reporter Sarah Palermo started her report on the outlook in The Sentinel's edition of December 11th, 2008:
"Visions of sugarplums it's not. The forecast for the next 24 hours reads like the script of a road agent's nightmare - and it has one highway supervisor recalling the epic storms of the last decade. 'Our biggest concern right now is the loss of power and how long that may be,' says Kurt D. Blomquist, Keene's public works director. 'People could be without power through the weekend if this is along the lines of the '97 or '98 ice storms.'"

Most of the 23,000 residents of Keene, it turns out, were spared. All they got was a lot of rain,. But for tens of thousands of other people in southwestern New Hampshire, the nightmare possibility became a reality. Some were without electricity for weeks, many found refuge in emergency shelters, the endurance of emergency workers was stretched to the limit, and neighbors found themselves helping neighbors they had previously not known.

Excerpt from Chapter Three: Lessons Learned:

In 2005, Public Service Company of New Hampshire asked Plymouth State University meteorology professor Eric Hoffman to study storms over the years. The idea was that he could help the company predict power outages in the future.

The research was completed and a new package of software was in place last year. But the ice storm broke the rules. Typically winter storms in New Hampshire are confined to relatively narrow bands of geography. This one was far wider than normal, and freezing rain fell far longer than at any other time in recent history. In a report published shortly after the storm, when memories of power interruptions were still fresh in the public's mind, the company wrote: "There was no way of knowing that this storm would cause three times as many power outages as any major storm we've experienced in the past..."