This book focuses on electric grids and tells the stories about two villages separated by time, connected by proximity, and united by the challenges of maintaining a community under duress. The story of one village presents an insider's view of a natural disaster, describing the destruction of the electric grid in January 1998 and the emergence of a community that filled the resulting void. It begins with moments in the lives of people in the village of Potsdam, New York and expands to cover the breadth of the disaster. The book concludes with a timeline of events that traces the disaster from ... More

This book focuses on electric grids and tells the stories about two villages separated by time, connected by proximity, and united by the challenges of maintaining a community under duress. The story of one village presents an insider's view of a natural disaster, describing the destruction of the electric grid in January 1998 and the emergence of a community that filled the resulting void. It begins with moments in the lives of people in the village of Potsdam, New York and expands to cover the breadth of the disaster. The book concludes with a timeline of events that traces the disaster from the storm's origins in the Gulf of Mexico to the lethal flooding it caused as it moved slowly up the eastern seaboard to the icy devastation it brought to the Northeast. The story of the other village begins nearly 200 years before the ice storm in a place called Louisville Landing, about twenty miles from Potsdam on the border between the United States and Canada. This narrative provides a glimpse of what it took to build the kind of grids that made America, the grids which connect people to one another, and is told through the experiences of some of the people who sacrificed the most to build the grids.