Sarena Preve gave birth to her daughter, Isabelle Ernst, 15 years ago during an ice storm that snapped trees and toppled power lines like never before.

Giving birth is memorable enough, but driving to the hospital in the middle of an ice storm while dodging downed trees and power lines makes for indelible memory.

It’s something Preve likes to remind her daughter about.

“She never fails to bring it up,” Isabelle said Tuesday, the day of her 15th birthday. “It’s just a funny story this time of year.”

The infamous 2008 storm – which began on Dec. 11 and continued through the wee hours of Dec. 12 – wreaked havoc from Maine to Pennsylvania and left 400,000 Granite State residents without power, some for weeks. After the storm stopped, everything was glazed over in a coat of ice.

Somewhere during that night 15 years ago, Preve went into labor, six days before her due date, forcing her partner, Jason Ernst, to drive to Concord Hospital, which was normally a 45-minute trip from their home in Northwood in the middle of the night.

They packed a bag, backed out of the driveway, heard low-hanging branches scraping the car and turned the wheel hard to avoid a tree at the end of the driveway.

With the car dodging obstacles in what looked like a video game, it took them two hours to get to the hospital.

“We were nervous because of the weather and there were so many branches and power lines down,” Preve said. “We knew to drive slow and we were not too panicked. We knew that panicking would not help.”

As for the possibility of delivering at home due to the storm, Preve was having none of it.

“That was nothing we considered at all,” she said. “We went to the hospital and it was tough. There were moving branches and it was tough to drive there with no power anywhere.”

They endured a white-knuckle drive to Concord Hospital, with creative maneuvering by Jason and steady breathing by Preve.

The storm and Isabelle’s nickname given by her grandfather, Ice-a-Bell, will forever be intertwined in the family’s lives, giving the parents entertaining material to recount at gatherings.

“When I think of it,” Preve had said in the past, “mostly I remember the drive there and how dark it was and how sparkly it was at the time with all the ice. We had to drive around down trees and power lines. There was a downed line in Concord, just before the hospital. He had to drive through someone’s backyard. It was catastrophic.”

The hospital was powerless when they got there. They registered using pen and paper, not by computer.

By the time Isabelle was born on the 12th, the second day of the storm, it had knocked out power to more than 1.7 million customers in and around New England.

Fifteen years later, following a move to Exeter, Isabelle is a freshman at Exeter High School. She’s class vice president and a member of the varsity soccer and winter track teams.

She said her parents began talking to her about the experience when she was 8 or 9. “That’s when I first realized, ‘Wow, this really happened,’ ” Isabelle said.

She had a small party this week, with birthday cake, flowers, gifts and a unique story, for anyone who cared to hear it.

“Any chance my mom gets, she mentions it and tells the story,” Isabelle said. “A lot of people know about it by now.”