By State › Maine

Maine: Overview

Download all of Maine as PDF Print

Everything in the main manual and the skill guides applies in Maine exactly as written. What’s different here is the specific hazard profile and the state, local, and legal context around it. This page is the starting point; the other three pages under Maine go deeper on laws, local resources, and the data behind the risks named here.

The Ice Storm of 1998: identified as Maine’s worst natural disaster

Between January 5 and 9, 1998, waves of freezing rain coated Maine in up to 3 inches of ice, knocking out power to roughly 900,000 residents at some point during the days-long storm and damaging an estimated 17 million acres of forest. A later study identified it as the worst natural disaster in Maine’s history, and all 16 of the state’s counties were declared federal disaster areas. See the Risks page for the full data.

The January 2024 coastal storms: a new all-time record, twice in one week

On January 10 and again on January 13, 2024, two severe coastal storms struck Maine back to back, driving wind gusts of 60-80 mph and aligning storm surge with the month’s highest astronomical tide. The Portland tide gauge, with continuous records dating back to 1912, recorded a water level of 14.57 feet on January 13, breaking the previous all-time record of 14.17 feet set during the Blizzard of 1978. Historic structures on the waterfront, including 200-year-old fishing shacks at Fisherman’s Point, were destroyed. See the Risks page for the full data.

What this means for how you use the rest of this manual

The manual’s Tier structure and the skill guides apply without modification. What’s different in Maine: this manual’s extended-power-outage guidance carries real weight given the 1998 ice storm’s scale, and coastal households should treat “record” flood levels as something that can be broken again soon, not a fixed ceiling, given that Maine set a new all-time coastal water-level record in January 2024, just 46 years after the previous record was set.

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