ENID — The last weekend in January 2002 was unseasonably warm, with highs in the 60s and 70s.

That weekend marked the first anniversary of the tragic plane crash that claimed the lives of 10 men affiliated with the Oklahoma State basketball program.

The Enron scandal dominated the national news, while locally Walmart and the city were in discussions about building a supercenter on West Garriott.

The area was bone dry, in the grips of a prolonged drought. That Sunday the New England Patriots and St. Louis Rams qualified for the Super Bowl.

The weather, as it is wont to do in these parts, changed quickly early in the week. Tuesday’s forecast was for temperatures in the 30s and a 30 percent chance of freezing rain. Ominously, the area was under a winter storm watch.

On television, the weather folk began beating the drum for what they called a “significant ice storm.”

Their definition of “significant” was unclear. Did this mean a coating of ice that would make the roads a skating rink and threaten small tree limbs? Or did significant mean icemageddon, the ice storm to end all ice storms, or “Oh my God I’ve never seen anything like this before and hope to never see it again,” significant.

Tuesday night President Bush told us the state of the union was strong, despite the war in Afghanistan and the economic recession.

The forecast for Wednesday was for highs in the 20s and a 90 percent chance of freezing rain. On television, the drumbeat grew louder. Significant ice storm, they kept saying. Significant.

Wednesday, the rain came, thunder rumbled and lightning split the sky. The cold rain fell relentlessly and ice began to form.

It started as a thin coating on power lines and tree branches. Most of us went about our business as if nothing was happening outside.

Soon the coating of ice grew thicker and heavier.

Sometime around noon, the power went out downtown, plunging our newspaper office into darkness.

We laughed and joked about it at first, huddling in the break room eating lunch. But as the minutes stretched on, and we still had no power, the laughter turned into nervous chuckles. No power, no newspaper. We had to find someplace else to do our jobs.

Autry Technology Center still had power, so we packed up some computer gear and headed out there.

A surreal scene confronted us as we drove across town. Tree limbs already littered the streets, forcing us to circumnavigate an obstacle course on our trip north.

Autry lost power almost as soon as we got there, so back across town we drove. We were confronted by the sound of gunshots, but there were no guns, only the sharp crack of trees shedding limbs or splitting in two.

We eventually went to our sister paper in Stillwater, which never lost power. There we published the Jan. 31, 2002, Enid News & Eagle, which sported the banner, all-caps headline “ENID AREA ON ICE” and landed on ice-covered porches and driveways all over town that morning.

At that point we had a pretty good idea of what the weather folks’ definition of “significant” was.

In the wee hours of that Thursday morning we drove into Enid from the east on U.S. 412. There was a glow on the horizon, beckoning like a desert oasis. It was St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center, bathed in light thanks to generators.

But most of the rest of the city was pitch dark. It was the dark of the deep woods, of a pristine wilderness, not of a city of some 50,000 souls.

We picked our way around felled trees as we made our way home and collapsed into bed in our cold homes, then awoke the next morning to dazzling sunshine and a bejeweled, glistening world the likes of which most of us never had seen.

Everyone has a story of that storm and its aftermath. Some people huddled in shelters or queued up for a hot meal at Our Daily Bread. We huddled around our fireplaces, cooking hot dogs or warming soup. We navigated our homes by flashlight. We actually talked to our family, rather than merely flopping down in front of the TV.

It turned out to be icemageddon, one of those “Oh, my God I’ve never seen anything like this and hope to never see it again” experiences.

Everyone who lived through it has a story of where they were when the lights went out, how they coped, how they stayed warm and how long they were in the dark.

They have tales of difficulty finding gasoline, of being led through the grocery store by an employee with a flashlight but finding little left on the shelves.

Above all else, in the wake of the great ice storm, people helped each other, opened their homes, checked on their neighbors and cleared limbs from their neighborhoods.

When things seemed at their worst in the days following icemageddon, we witnessed the best in ourselves and our neighbors.

It’s a shame it takes something like a catastrophic ice storm to bring out the best in humanity, but it is comforting to know we have it in us when we need it.

It also is comforting to look back on it 10 years hence. I had never seen anything like it before and hope to never see it again.



Mullin is News & Eagle senior writer. Email him at jmullin@enidnews.com.