It was cold, it was dark, there was nowhere to go and nothing to do.
Well, maybe not nothing, exactly. Because nine months after the December ice storm paralyzed the region, Allen County saw a baby boom.
According to the Fort Wayne-Allen County Department of Health’s Division of Vital Records, live births were up 15 percent in September over September 2008. That’s 67 more babies born.
“We were busier than normal,” said Joyce Thompson, director of The Birthplace at Dupont Hospital. “We needed to have all our staff here.”
The ice storm that struck northeast Indiana on Dec. 19 left 120,000 households without power at one point. Roads were blocked by fallen tree limbs. Businesses were closed. Temperatures fell to single digits.
Those who didn’t stay with relatives or go to emergency shelters huddled under blankets trying to keep warm the best way they knew how.
“There were a lot of chilly people out there,” said Ashley Schilb of Fort Wayne. She was laughing when she said that, because she and her husband, Aaron, have a lasting reminder of their own “splendor in the ice” – baby Henry, who was due Sept. 6.
Aaron had been working in Cincinnati and returned just before the ice storm. If absence makes the heart grow fonder, their fondness was, um, taken care of by their being stuck in the house together when he got home. Their electricity was out only a few hours, but they couldn’t go anywhere.
“It was probably more for us that he had been gone for a few days than the ice storm in general,” Ashley said. “We couldn’t even park in our driveway, it was so thickly covered with ice; we had to park in the cul-de-sac and walk through the grass. … We were inside for probably three days.”
The number of births in any given area naturally rises and falls, and it is human nature to try to attribute the rises to an event nine months before. Ashley was a labor-and-delivery nurse in Cincinnati after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
“We had the same thing after 9/11,” she said. “People were upset and cuddled together.”
But experts often say that to spark the kind of sparks that create babies, a natural disaster has to have one key element: A loss of electricity. Fort Wayne’s Blizzard of 2007, for example, dumped 8 inches of snow on the region and shut down the city on Valentine’s Day. Thousands of people were trapped in their homes on the most romantic day of the year.
But what happened? Not much, apparently.
With the electricity still on, it seems the lure of television, game systems and other distractions were even stronger than the call of the bedroom. Babies conceived on Valentine’s Day would have been due about the first of November, but births in both October and November of 2007 were down from the year before.
Maybe everyone was tired from shoveling all that snow.
The ice storm, by contrast, not only left thousands without power but left them that way for days, while temperatures plummeted and the wind howled. There were no episodes of “Lost” or anything else on, and the only heat was the kind you made yourselves.
Dupont’s Thompson said September usually brings an increase in the number of births thanks to the holidays 40 weeks before.
“Normally, we do have a bump in the numbers,” Thompson said. “We always call it the Christmas rush. … We just attribute it to keeping warm in the wintertime and snuggling more.”
But this September rush was different.
Last year, for example, births in September were up 8 percent from August. This year, September births were up 19 percent over August.
And those figures don’t include baby Henry Schilb, because he arrived early, on Aug. 14. Despite the early delivery and about a week in the neonatal intensive care unit, he’s now doing great, Ashley said.
“He’s perfect now,” she said. “Big and fat.”
