A rough correlation should then be made between the meteorological severity of the weather and the severity of the outages to see if historical ratios of damage to storm intensity were exceeded. The tree health assessments should be made available as quickly as possible to the general public and government officials as well as to power company officials. The following information posted by Brian Potter, while not from the official weather record, is a very useful start for general discussion of the relative severity of the storms that hit New England last winter and the amount of tree damage they might be expected to cause to healthy trees. Because deciduous trees lose their foliage during the winter months and the bare limbs and branches present little surface for snow accumulation, heavy wet snows tend to have minimal loading effect on the trees. Couple this with winds strong enough to move the limbs and tops of trees, and little snow will accumulate.
Healthy conifers cope with heavy snows by shedding it off as their limbs bend down.
Ice storms, not snow storms cause the most severe damage to healthy trees. Ice can freeze in thick layers on both hardwoods and conifers, often more on one side of the tree than the other until the point is reached where limbs and trees snap. Wind aggravates this stress and does little to dislodge the ice until it begins to melt. To the best of my knowledge there was little if any icing associated with these storms and winds were not exceptionally strong for trees without their foliage. Given the circumstances I outline above, it seems unlikely that some of the most prolonged and widespread power outages on record would occur last winter unless the trees were unusually weak and prone to damage.