By Aedan Seaver
One day last January, Austin Lewis was praying in his rural home outside of Creswell. Suddenly, he says, he felt a “nudge” from God, and knew what he had to do. When he told his wife he was going to town to buy a portable generator and cans of fuel, she pointed out the ways the money might be better spent. But Lewis insisted this was the right purchase.
One week later, on Jan. 13, 2024, one of the worst ice storms to ever hit the southern Willamette Valley ripped through Lewis’ property, destroying power lines and stranding his family in the house, where they huddled around the wood stove and blessed the new generator for keeping the lights on.
Last January’s ice storm closed schools, downed trees, damaged houses, turned roads into treacherous slip-n-slides and left thousands of Lane County residents without power — in some cases for over two weeks. Many rural homeowners are still recovering from last year’s storm, even as the National Weather Service predicted another wet winter and the possibility of more weather events like last year’s.
Lewis, a pastor at Summit Creek Church, has lived with his wife Sarah Lewis and their three young boys in the countryside outside of Creswell for three years. For the first few days of last January’s storm, Austin Lewis and his family stayed holed up in their house, where they’d stockpiled 25 gallons of water, enough canned food for a few weeks and plenty of firewood. The world outside was an icy tomb, the ground and trees frozen solid.
Oregon ice storms occur when cold air from the northeast is funneled down through the Columbia River Gorge and eventually the Willamette Valley, causing surface temperatures to drop below freezing. The relatively warm lower atmosphere is thus sandwiched between the freezing surface and the cold upper atmosphere.
When combined with low pressure, this sandwich creates the right setup for freezing rain, according to meteorologist Adam Batz of the National Weather Service in Portland. “What happens is you get precipitation that starts off as snow or some sort of ice, falls into a warmer layer, and melts, but then the surface is still below freezing,” Batz says.
According to Batz, last year’s storm was especially impactful because of the compounding impacts of two low-pressure systems back-to-back. “We thought there was going to be a thaw and that didn’t happen, and then you got more ice on top of that,” Batz says.
Stranded on their hill in this twice-frozen landscape, Lewis and his family were ready to wait out the storm. As the wind picked up and the ice began to thaw and crack, however, trees began to fall, unable to bear their inch-thick burdens of ice. Among the fallen was the huge oak tree in front of Lewis’ house. “It sounded like a massive chandelier fell out of the sky,” Lewis says.
He and his family soon decided they’d be safer at a neighbor’s house. Using his skills as a former firefighter, Lewis cut a path through the fallen trees to make it up the hill. Once his family was safe, he took the initiative to check in on the neighbors and make runs for people who needed supplies.
“It’s kind of cool — the community up there on the hill. We all check in on each other,” Lewis says.
One of Lewis’ neighbors is Karen Heater, an elderly widow who’s lived outside of Creswell for 65 years. She says last January’s storm was the worst she can remember. “There was no way I could even step out the door because it was just thick ice,” she says.
Heater says staying prepared for extreme weather is just part of living in the country. “I love it up here,” she says. “I always just say thank goodness for wood, water and batteries.”
Heater, Lewis, and many of their neighbors are members of Lane Electric, a member-owned nonprofit energy cooperative that provides power to nearly 11,000 rural Lane County residents. Although fallen trees make outages more common in rural areas, last year’s storm was particularly devastating, according to April Matson, Lane Electric Public Relations and Member Services manager.
“The first part of the storm came through and took down power across the board,” Matson says. “I think all utilities had a similar experience where we got people back up, but then the second wave came through and things that had just been restored came back down again.”
Lewis says he was impressed by Lane Electric’s response to the havoc wreaked by last January’s storm. “Holy smokes, those guys are amazing,” Lewis says. “They were out there in the horrible weather, and it wasn’t like, ‘Oh, we’re going to wait it out.’ They were out there working on things as quickly as they could.”
In preparation for more storms like last year’s, Lane Electric has cut down trees in danger of falling on power lines and worked to rebuild in a way that’s “stronger for the future,” according to Matson. Many utilities, including Lane Electric, have also applied for grant funding through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which Matson says will be applied to more long-term upgrades.
Batz says there’s no way to predict if this winter will bring another ice storm to Lane County. “These seasonal outlooks have skill in seasonal totals and averages, but they don’t have skill in the sense that they can predict impacts associated with a short duration storm system,” he says. “What I will say is that ice storms are not generally uncommon in this area. They happen every few years, if not every year.”
A prediction one way or the other might not affect how seasoned rural residents prepare for winter. Both Lewis and Heater say they feel prepared this year for the possibility of another ice storm. Although Lewis hasn’t gotten around to mending his collapsed fencing or clearing all the fallen trees from last January, he recently stocked enough firewood, food, water and fuel to get his family through a week without power.
Heater, who has lived alone since her husband died nine years ago, says she plans to hook her generator up to the television and dust off her battery-powered radio to keep up with the outside world. “Because,” Heater says, “it gets boring without anything, you know?”
This story received support from the Local News Initiative at the Catalyst Journalism Project, based at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication. For more, see CatalystJournalism.uoregon.edu.