By State › New Hampshire

New Hampshire: Risks & Trends

Download all of New Hampshire 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 Great Hurricane of 1938

MetricFigure
Date September 21, 1938
New Hampshire deaths 13
Southern New England regional deaths 564-682 (see Connecticut's page for the full regional breakdown)
Peak wind, Mount Washington 163 mph, destroying the Cog Railway's trestle
Peterborough bridges destroyed 10
Regional damage (1938 dollars / 2024-adjusted) $306 million / ~$4.7 billion

Why this is still called New Hampshire's worst disaster

This storm struck New England with almost no advance warning, decades before organized hurricane forecasting existed. That near-total surprise, more than the storm’s raw intensity alone, is why it’s remembered as uniquely catastrophic: nobody had the chance to prepare the way modern forecasting now allows for a storm of similar strength.

The December 2008 ice storm

MetricFigure
Dates December 11-12, 2008
Customers without power 400,000+
Longest restoration time Up to 2 weeks for some customers
Utility poles destroyed 780
Transformers destroyed 1,300
Schools closed 450+
Deaths 4
Injuries 100+
Historical ranking Called the most damaging storm in the state's power-grid history by utilities at the time

An outage duration worth planning around

Two weeks without power is a genuinely long outage, well past what a typical household’s stored supplies or a small generator’s fuel reserve is built for. This is the clearest New England example on the site of why this manual’s extended-outage guidance, not just its short-term outage guidance, matters even in a state without hurricane-force coastal risk.

Sources