Ice Storm of January 1999

The Ice Storm of January 1999 was a severe ice storm that struck the Washington D.C. metropolitan area on January 14 and 15, 1999. Heavy ice accumulation bringing down power lines resulted in around 745,000 people in the area losing power. Many of the major power companies supplying DC, Maryland, and Virginia had significant portions of their customer bases impacted. At the height of the storm, around one third of PEPCO's customers were without power, with some waiting up to two weeks for power to be restored.

Famous quotes containing the words ice, storm and/or january:

    He was high and mighty. But the kindest creature to his slaves—and the unfortunate results of his bad ways were not sold, had not to jump over ice blocks. They were kept in full view and provided for handsomely in his will. His wife and daughters in the might of their purity and innocence are supposed never to dream of what is as plain before their eyes as the sunlight, and they play their parts of unsuspecting angels to the letter.
    —Anonymous Antebellum Confederate Women. Previously quoted by Mary Boykin Chesnut in Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, edited by C. Vann Woodward (1981)

    I care not what the sailors say:
    All those dreadful thunder-stones,
    All that storm that blots the day
    Can but show that Heaven yawns;
    Great Europa played the fool
    That changed a lover for a bull.
    William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)

    and you undid the reins
    and I undid the buttons,
    the bones, the confusions,
    The New England postcards,
    the January ten o’clock night,
    and we rose up like wheat....
    Anne Sexton (1928–1974)