Keene newspaper publishes book on 2008 ice storm

Joseph Albert Hay died Sept. 28, 1826, at the tender age of 3½ and was laid to rest in the Dublin town cemetery, near the shores of Dublin Pond.

Some 183 years later, while workers were clearing fallen trees and limbs from the cemetery following last December’s ice storm, a crane truck toppled sideways and shattered Joseph’s headstone.

The town of Dublin spent roughly $150,000 clearing up after the storm, and one small part of that included having a duplicate tombstone made for Joseph at Keene Monument Co., right down to a spelling error in the original: The original monument maker had left the “L” out of “Albert,” then added it afterward with a proofreader’s caret.

An account of the incident can be found in a new book on the ice storm, published by the Keene Sentinel newspaper.

The paperback “Ice,” subtitled “The December 2008 storm in New Hampshire’s Monadnock Region,” is available at stores around the region and online at www.monadnockicestorm 2008.com.

The first that Keene Sentinel Editor James Rousmaniere Jr. heard of the storm was a loud “snap” outside his home in Roxbury, a hamlet just outside Keene.

“I recall hearing a very loud snap around 3 o’clock in the morning,” he said recently. “I had no idea what that was. I’d never heard it before.”

Once dawn broke, Rousmaniere saw that a large pine bough had broken, landing in his yard. Although downtown Keene was largely spared – as in Nashua, urban areas have fewer trees to take down power lines – Rousmaniere said the magnitude of the storm became clear after he reached the office and began hearing accounts from other staffers, residents and news reports from around the region.

“We had something that was pretty unusual,” he recalled. “We were immediately on the case.”

The paper’s reporters and photographers began fanning out around the region, realizing the severity of the storm as they began to run afoul of downed lines and limbs. After four days of all-hands-on-deck reporting, and reading a story in the Dec. 15 edition of his own paper that listed how many homes and businesses in each town still lacked power, Rousmaniere had one of those “aha” moments.

“I just saw all these many homes and imagined all the many families living in those homes” and all the businesses that were closed, Rousmaniere said.

He realized the ice storm was a big story, and it begged telling in a big way. They could write a book about it.

“Here you had something that was highly visual but was going to be remembered by a large number of people,” he said. “If 12,000 homes are without electricity in the cold . . . right there we have a memorable event.”

These last few years have been interesting times for the newspaper business, with customers increasingly insisting on reading the product for free online, classified ad revenue evaporating and advertising budgets shrinking.

“The advertising market is so poor, we thought it was time to experiment with a way to create a product that was not dependent on advertising,” Rousmaniere said.

Staff members began gathering material for the book almost right away, and the first run of 1,000 copies was completed in August, he said. Although the paper had never published a book before, everything but the actual printing and binding was done in-house.

The paper worked on getting the book into bookshops and general stores around the region, and then started to promote it, Rousmaniere said. It has sold more than 500 copies so far, passing the “break even” point, he said.

“It’s doing pretty well, so we feel good about that,” Rousmaniere said. “We enjoyed it. It was a lot of work.”

Not surprisingly, the book is more a series of articles than a single, continuous narrative. Much of the material consists of personal anecdotes, including the recollections of staff writers and photographers, who had to both cover and live with the storm at the same time.

Reporter Amanda Borozinski wrote of how she and her family escaped possible death when their carbon monoxide alarm sounded to alert them to fumes from a generator outside; editorial assistant Ashley Reams wrote of moving with her fiance (now husband) into their new home in Gilsum on Dec. 11, in the midst of the melee, and getting there just in time to lose power.

Staff members caught up with Richard Sims, of Harrisville, whom they had photographed as he waited on foot amid a line of cars at a Dublin gas station, holding a red plastic two-gallon gas can in each hand. They had photographed him at the time, and later learned that he’d received a ride back home after walking the three miles to the pumps, and had been without power for 11 days.

The paper also culled testimony from a Public Utilities Commission hearing, accounts from town reports and, in one case, the day’s log from the Hancock Public Works Department. They persuaded a woman who had written a letter to the editor, warning about the dangers that downed limbs could pose to cross-country skiers, to expound on her experience of surviving a severe puncture wound to her leg.

The vignettes are gathered into three sections: “The Storm,” “The Aftermath” and “Lessons From the Storm.”

Working on the latter sections showed how the country’s experience earlier in the decade, with Sept. 11, 2001, and Hurricane Katrina, had helped improve emergency preparation even here in New England, Rousmaniere said. A great deal of the stories focus on how communities responded to the storm, and the book ends with a suggested household checklist of items that should be at hand when the weather turns bad.

“This is a weather event, but it’s largely social history,” Rousmaniere said.

Andrew Wolfe can be reached at 594-6410 or awolfe@nashuatelegraph.com.