By State › New Hampshire

New Hampshire: Overview

Download all of New Hampshire as PDF Print

Everything in the main manual and the skill guides applies in New Hampshire 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 New Hampshire go deeper on laws, local resources, and the data behind the risks named here.

The Great Hurricane of 1938: often called New Hampshire’s worst disaster

On September 21, 1938, a hurricane that struck New England with almost no warning, this was decades before organized hurricane forecasting, is widely considered the worst natural disaster in New Hampshire’s history. Connecticut’s page on this site covers the storm’s broader Southern New England death toll (564-682 across the region); in New Hampshire specifically, 13 people died, and the storm’s winds reached a stunning 163 mph atop Mount Washington, destroying the Cog Railway’s trestle. Peterborough alone lost 10 bridges. See the Risks page for the full data.

The December 2008 ice storm: the most damaging storm in the state’s grid history

On December 11-12, 2008, freezing rain coated New Hampshire in ice heavy enough that utilities at the time called it the most damaging storm ever recorded on the state’s power grid. More than 400,000 customers lost power, some for as long as two weeks, and 780 utility poles and 1,300 transformers were destroyed outright. 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 New Hampshire: this manual’s extended-outage guidance is directly relevant here given the 2008 ice storm’s two-week restoration timeline for some customers, and coastal and mountain wind exposure, as Mount Washington’s 1938 reading shows, can be extreme even in a state most people don’t associate with hurricane risk.

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