By State › Maine

Maine: Risks & Trends

Download all of Maine as PDF Print

Same standard as every other page on this site: every figure below is independently sourced, and figures that vary across sources, or measure genuinely different things, are flagged as such rather than collapsed into one number that looks more precise than the underlying data actually supports.

The Ice Storm of 1998

MetricFigure
Dates January 5-9, 1998
Ice accumulation Up to 3 in
Deaths 5-8 (sources vary)
Peak power outages ~900,000 Mainers affected at some point during the storm
Forest acreage damaged ~17 million acres
State cost $320 million
Natural resource losses (separate estimate) $1 billion+
Federal disaster declaration All 16 Maine counties
Historical ranking Identified by a later study as the worst natural disaster in Maine's history

Why the death count varies

Sources report Maine deaths from this storm anywhere from 5 to 8, largely because the causes were indirect and varied: carbon monoxide poisoning from improperly used generators, hypothermia in an unheated home, a fall on a dark staircase, and a structural collapse under ice weight. These aren’t always counted the same way across different official tallies, which is why the range is presented rather than one number.

The January 2024 coastal storms

MetricFigure
Dates January 10 and January 13, 2024 (two separate storms)
Wind gusts 60-80 mph
Portland record water level, Jan 13 14.57 ft, a new all-time record
Previous record 14.17 ft, set during the Blizzard of 1978
Portland gauge record history Continuous since 1912
Notable losses Historic fishing shacks at Fisherman's Point, some with 200-year-old timbers, destroyed at Willard Beach

A record broken after 46 years, not a century

The previous Portland record stood since 1978, 46 years before it was broken. That’s a meaningfully shorter interval than “once in a lifetime” framing usually implies, and it’s a useful data point for any coastal Maine household treating past record floods as a fixed ceiling rather than a number that can be exceeded again within a single adult’s lifetime.

Sources