“It’s night and a steady rain is falling. The early winter air is just cold enough to freeze the drops wherever they land as gradually overburdened trees fill the darkness with a creaking and brittle clatter. By morning, a clearing wind increases the noisy breakage over a landscape of glittering ice. Everything–fields, fences, roads the tortured trees, sagging power and telephone lines–is encased in the brilliant glaze, at once beautiful and ruinous.

“Movement through this crystalline world is difficult, but the first to venture out are telephone maintenance men, for open wire must inevitably snap under weights of ice that split large tree limbs. The damage is surveyed in any way it can be–by car, on foot, by airplane. Location and number of wire breaks and downed poles are reported to storm headquarters. Orders rush out for materials and manpower. Temporary garages must be set up to receive and distribute these supplies, while hotels and eating places are contacted to prepare for an influx of hundreds of construction men. Then, the moment roads become passable and power line hazards are removed, line crews move into the damaged area and work begins.”

(from NWB Magazine, January 1954)

Additional Photos

Some say ice and sleet have caused more damage to telephone poles and lines than any other agent. Certainly in the Midwest states that comprised northwestern Bell’s territory, freezing rain is frequent, fierce and destructive to plant. Here are images of a few such storms in our mid-west states: