Fourth Monday of the Year.

This Week: Ice Storms and Infrastructure

Right now, more than a million people across the United States are without power. Not because of hurricanes. Not because of tornadoes. Because of ice. A thin layer of frozen water coating power lines, tree branches, and transmission towers. In Nashville alone, 230,000 customers lost electricity as ice accumulated across the city. Utility crews are working around the clock, but the damage is widespread. And the outages will last for days.

Most people see ice as an inconvenience. Cold rain that makes roads slick and sidewalks dangerous. But to infrastructure systems—power grids, communication networks, transportation routes—ice is a compound weight problem. And when weight compounds on systems designed for averages, not extremes, those systems fail. Not because they're poorly built. But because they're operating beyond the limits they were designed to handle.

And if you want to understand just how destructive that compound weight can be, you need to go back to January 1998. To one of the most catastrophic infrastructure failures in North American history.

The 1998 Ice Storm: When Infrastructure Collapsed

The 1998 North American Ice Storm started on January 4 and lasted for five days. It covered a 2,000-mile stretch from northern New York through New England and into southeastern Canada. And it didn't just disrupt life. It dismantled infrastructure.

By the time the storm ended, more than 4 million people had lost electricity. Over 1,000 transmission towers collapsed. Another 35,000 utility poles came down. In some areas, people were without power for weeks. Not days. Weeks. The economic damage exceeded $5-6 billion across affected regions. And the reason wasn't just the storm itself—it was what the storm revealed.

Ice storms produce what meteorologists call glaze ice—a dense, smooth layer of frozen water that bonds directly to whatever it touches. Unlike snow, which is mostly air and sits loosely on surfaces, glaze ice adheres. It coats power lines, tree branches, cables, and poles uniformly. And it adds weight. A lot of it.

Here's what that means in practice: half an inch of ice accumulation on a single span of power line can add approximately 500 pounds of extra weight. Five hundred pounds. From half an inch. That's not a rough estimate—that's what utility engineers measure when they assess storm damage. And when you multiply that across miles of transmission lines, across thousands of poles and towers, the cumulative load becomes catastrophic.

In 1998, that's exactly what happened. Ice accumulated for days. It didn't melt. It just kept building. And as the weight increased, the infrastructure couldn't hold. Transmission towers buckled. Poles snapped. Tree branches loaded with ice fell onto lines that were already stressed beyond capacity. And because the grid is interconnected, failures cascaded. One downed line triggered outages blocks away. One collapsed tower took out entire neighborhoods.

And here's the part that doesn't get talked about enough: utilities had to make operational decisions in real time to prevent total collapse. When ice damage compromises part of a grid, operators sometimes intentionally shut down other sections to protect the system as a whole. It's a strategy called load shedding. They sacrifice controlled portions of service to prevent catastrophic, uncontrolled failure across the entire network.

It's not reactive chaos. It's planned strategy under extreme pressure.

But even with those strategies, the 1998 storm overwhelmed the system. The infrastructure wasn't designed for that kind of sustained load. The assumptions built into the grid—about average weather, typical ice accumulation, standard failure rates—didn't account for days of compound weight. And when those assumptions failed, the system did too.

That's the real lesson from 1998: infrastructure is designed for what's normal, not what's extreme. And when extreme conditions arrive, they don't just cause problems. They expose every weak point, every fragile connection, every assumption that was never stress-tested. Ice doesn't break systems. It reveals them.

The Thin Layers That Compound

The thing about infrastructure is that it's invisible until it fails. You flip a light switch, and electricity flows. You turn on a faucet, and water comes out. You open your phone, and the network connects. You don't think about the transmission towers, the buried cables, the switching stations, the distribution networks. You don't think about them because they work. Until they don't.

And when they fail, people ask: why wasn't this built stronger? Why wasn't there redundancy? Why didn't someone plan for this? But the reality is more complicated. Infrastructure is expensive. Building systems that can handle every possible extreme isn't just costly—it's often impractical. So engineers design for probabilities. For averages. For conditions that happen 95% of the time. And most of the time, that works. Until the extreme event happens. And then the question becomes: did we design for resilience, or did we design for efficiency?

The same dynamic plays out in businesses and in personal operations. Most people build their systems—their schedules, their workflows, their processes—for average conditions. Normal workload. Typical demand. Standard circumstances. And when things are normal, those systems perform well. But when extreme conditions hit—a sudden deadline, an unexpected crisis, a compounding problem—the system reveals its limits. Not because it was poorly designed. But because it was designed for a different set of assumptions.

The same is true in operations. A small inefficiency doesn't seem important. A minor process gap doesn't feel urgent. A thin layer of operational friction doesn't appear heavy. Until it compounds. And then it brings the whole system down.

That's why operations are so often undervalued. They're not flashy. They're not the thing people talk about at conferences or highlight in pitch decks. Marketing gets attention. Sales gets resources. Financials get scrutiny. But operations? Operations are the infrastructure. The invisible layer that makes everything else possible. And when they're weak—when they're designed for average conditions and never stress-tested—they fail under compound weight. Just like power lines in an ice storm.

Right now, utility crews are working in freezing temperatures to restore power to over a million people. They're replacing poles, restringing lines, and clearing debris. It's slow, dangerous work. And it's a reminder that infrastructure isn't just something that exists. It's something that has to be maintained, upgraded, and redesigned as conditions change.

The same is true for your operations. The systems you built for normal conditions won't survive extreme ones. But if you pay attention to the thin layers—the small inefficiencies, the minor gaps, the operational friction—you can prevent compound failure before it happens. Ice storms reveal infrastructure. Pressure reveals operations. The question is: are you building for resilience, or just hoping for average conditions?

Sources

• AP News: "Massive winter storm dumps sleet, freezing rain and snow around much of US"

• Axios Nashville: "Nearly half of Nashville without power during ice storm"

• The Washington Post: "Power outages, school closures, frigid temperatures follow massive storm"

• Wikipedia: "January 1998 North American ice storm"

• Entergy: "January Winter Storm update – 1/22/26, 7 a.m." (500 lbs per line span data)

• Border States: "Fight winter power outages with close substation monitoring"

• MRCC (Purdue): "Ice Storms - Midwestern Regional Climate Center"