Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Report from the Ice Palace

We drove in to the post office at Brookland about noon. The sign on the door said they were open, but there was no mail in our box, so maybe nobody sent us anything.
A walking tour of our neighborhood showed nobody's house got hit when the trees were snapping last night.
Last night was like being under an artillery barrage - one loud shotgun-like report after another, many followed by a heavy thud as a tree or big branch hit the ground. After a few hours of this, you start to wonder if the next one will be the one to cave in your roof or smash your car.
I woke up about 2:30 a.m. and slept fitfully until about 4 a.m. when I seriously considered getting up to survey the damage. I decided against it and managed to doze until about 7 a.m.
By then, the sky was clear and the rising sun revealed a landscape of crystalline chaos. The reason the bangs and crashes had stopped wasn't because the rain had stopped so much as it was that everything that could break had broken. It's hard to find a tree with its top intact. I remember a similar ice storm in north central Indiana in April, 1991, that took down major electrical transmission lines and left some communities without power for weeks. This was apparently on that scale to our north and west, but even so it may be several days before we get electricity again.
The kerosene heater turned out to be a stroke of genius. It's not enough to heat the whole house, but it does provide relief from the chill. I'm blogging from the newspaper office and the temperature in our house was about 57 when we left at 2 p.m.
We're looking at an overnight low of 19 tonight, so it will be plenty chilly in the house tomorrow morning.
Maria got enough hot water out of the water heater in the garage utility room for a hot bath before bedtime last night. I'm counting on the water heater that serves the guest bedrooms to have enough hot water left for a shower this evening.
Fortunately, we have a good supply of batteries for our flashlights and we scrounged up several candles as well. Maria dug out her grandmother's kerosene lamp, which has a brand new wick in it, so we're better prepared than we were last night.
Fortunately, Maria had today off, but we came into the office this afternoon to charge cell phones and she's reading page proofs to help get tomorrow's paper out.
The Walmart supercenter on the southside was closed today because they were sold out of groceries, People have bought up all of the available generators and heaters and more are on the way to stores tomorrow. The electric utilities are warning people not to hook the generators directly into their homes' electrical systems without the proper circuitry because they can backfeed power into the grid and injure or kill linemen or anyone else touching a downed power line.
Emergency shelters have been set up at area churches and hospitals where electricity and heat are available and apparently most of them are full or filling fast. Our neighbors dropped by last evening to say they had rooms reserved at a Jonesboro motel and wondered if we wanted to come along. We thanked them, but begged off because we needed to stay with our dogs, and promised to keep an eye on their house.
I've been meaning for months to gas and prep the chainsaw that I bought more than a year ago and the downed tree across the driveway forced my hand this morning. Fortunately, there was enough gas left in the lawnmower gas can to mix with 2-cycle oil and crank the sucker up. I suspect the whole neighborhood will contract with a tree service to clear away the wreckage because there is way too much fallen lumber on any one lot for the owner to cope with using just a home chainsaw.

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