Inconvenient Truths About the Ice Storm

Like many households in northern New England, ours had been thrown into disarray as the morning of Friday, December 12 arrived. My wife and I had just finished conferring about which of us would stay home from work, since school had been canceled for our resident first grader, when the lights went out, flickered back on for a second, and then plunged the house into sustained darkness.

The physician in the family headed off to the community hospital that employs her, figuring that she would be needed there, and so it fell to me, the resident law professor, to prepare for a day with a preschooler, a first grader and no electricity. As it turned out, hundreds of thousands of my neighbors across New Hampshire and Vermont were in more or less the same situation.

But here is where our story turns distinctly ugly – or, I expect, will seem ugly to many.

My first response, as my wife drove off, was to go back to bed. Leave the snoozing kids undisturbed, I reasoned, and deal with the power crisis after sun-up to save the battery power in our flashlights. This sanguine response proved to be an excellent strategy. Less than an hour after they went out, the lights were back on in our house for good.

Beneath this vignette and, indeed, underlying the devastation wrought by the big ice storms that seem to besiege our region every few years, are truths that go beyond mere inconvenience. They concern the land use patterns that order the most crucial aspects of our everyday lives.

It is our good fortune to live on less than a quarter of an acre, in a home that is within sight of our town’s public library, less than a quarter mile away from the local firehouse, police station, general store and elementary school. As the news reports of the ice storm have poignantly confirmed, it is precisely these densely settled downtown areas that principles of logistics and benefit maximization cause utilities to focus on first when widespread power outages occur.

Conversely, if you have chosen to live in an old farmhouse, on 70 acres of land, miles out of town, at or near the end of a long electricity distribution circuit, it is quite foreseeable that it would take line crews days and days to restore power to you. Your utility, of course, could maintain a sufficiently vast, permanent army of line crews as to assure that all storm-related outages lasted an hour or less, but this would drive rates to ridiculous levels. As it is, the high cost of restoring power to outlying customers will be borne by all of us, as utilities gain regulatory approval to replenish the storm reserve funds they use to confront these weather emergencies.

Situations like these should really cause us to ask how many countryside dwellers really ought to be living where they live. Obviously, if you are a farmer, truly living off the land, you have every reason to reside far from the nearest town or village. Indeed, as New England rediscovers the value of its local economy, we should encourage and subsidize locally owned agricultural land users.

But the rest of us should ask whether the faux-rural existence, however bucolic, is sustainable and sensible if we want our communities to persist over the long term.

I made this point, gently, at a holiday party held at the height of the storm-induced outages, to a colleague of my wife who had been without electricity for several days. Last summer my family had attended her housewarming, which celebrated the purchase of n remodeled 19th Century farmhouse on a bucolic dirt road. My kids swam in her pond; now she and her husband were wondering when they would next get to shower or bathe.

“It was the only house we could afford to buy,” she reported.

This is not surprising, given the widespread use of zoning and planning techniques that discourage high-density, in-town development, in combination with the hidden subsidies (through things like utility rates, “current use” property tax measures, and even road maintenance budgets) for pseudo-rural living.

In a famous 2004 New Yorker magazine article, writer David Owen pronounced Manhattan a “utopian community” and a “model of environmental responsibility” when compared to the rest of America. In a classic example of "do as I say, not as I do" journalism, Owen admitted he had fled a tiny Manhattan apartment in the 1980s for an 18th Century rural Connecticut farmhouse, on a dirt road, amid deer and wild turkeys. He pointed out that if all 8 million New Yorkers lived in communities with the population density of his Connecticut town, it would consume an area as big as all of New England with New Jersey and Delaware thrown in.

That, more or less, is what we are gradually doing to northern New England. It is usually pleasant; my kids loved splashing around in that pond last summer. But sometimes, as with ice storms that decimate overhead electricity distribution systems, this approach to using the land causes widespread misery, or worse. I know that is easy for me to say, as an in-town dweller. It needs to be said anyway.