One year ago, a devastating ice storm brought Northern Michigan to its knees.
It’s hard to imagine what the areas looked like 12 months ago.
We want to take you back to the final days of March 2025, when meteorologists were calling for freezing rain in the region.
Over 60 hours from Friday evening through Monday morning, the area saw round after round of freezing rain.
As temperatures hovered around 32 degrees, the rain didn’t just fall, it froze, coating every tree branch, powerline, road and rooftop with a thick shell of ice.
In some areas, up to a half-inch and three-quarters of an inch of ice.
The weight of that ice brought down the power grid. Running water all but disappeared in rural areas. Cell service and internet went down — making it nearly impossible to reach loved ones or call for help. And it wasn’t just the land that took a hit. The Mackinac Bridge felt it too.
More than an inch of ice built up on the cables and towers of the bridge.
And as that ice started falling, it closed the bridge multiple times. According to the Mackinac Bridge Authority, the most significant ice event ever on the bridge.
What followed was a very long road to recovery. Because even though half an inch of ice doesn’t sound like much, the damage it left behind was staggering.
Now the state and business impact made a lot of headlines, but the regular people up there were hit just as hard.
Nick Monacelli spent a lot of time up north, and one of the people he came across was a homesteader named Laura Lawrence. She spent hours and hours documenting the ice storm on YouTube.
Nick Monacelli’s full report can be found in the video at the beginning of this article.