Yes, that's what the local officials are calling the raging ice storm we all endured Friday night into Saturday. It's one for the record books.....according to the Cumberland County Emergency Director. His assessment of our county is that from one end of it to the other "the damage is comparable to an F2 tornado over the entire county.".....and that's over 620 sq. miles.
Volunteer Electric Company announced that 22,634 homes and businesses were without power beginning Saturday morning. In highly populated states that may not be a big deal, but you need to understand our whole county has only 56,000
people in it, and if you factor that there are probably at least 2 -3 people in each home, that says that pretty much every home in the county was without power. I have not talked to anyone yet who didn't lose power.
But before the chaos struck, I went outside Friday afternoon and fed the birds again. We had several bright red cardinals stop by for a quick bite. They look especially pretty against the backdrop of all that white stuff on the ground.
Friday night we went to bed thinking we'd wake up to a bit more ice on the ground. Ha! The storm hit with a ferocious bang and all night long we would awaken to the sounds of something slamming against our house. It wasn't until the next morning that we discovered 2 sides of our house were completely covered in ice and the banging we heard thru the night was the sound of ice pellets hitting our windows and siding. I kept thinking one of our huge oak trees in front of the house was going to come crashing down into our bedroom, the ruckus was so loud.
This is the side of the porch we usually use after returning home from shopping. Ummm, not this past weekend. The screen door was frozen shut with a thick coating of ice. Snow blew onto the porch making it a slippery endeavor to walk on it.
But the porch was nothing compared to what we saw when we looked out beyond our house. The trees and everything exposed to the elements was coated in the thickest ice I've ever witnessed. It was beautiful to look at, but deadly to walk under. Why, you ask? Bah-ha-ha-ha! Because the winds picked up to 30 mph gusts and the trees were absolutely groaning under the weight of all that ice covering every single branch and twig.
See how much the trees are bent over from the extra weight? Now imagine them swinging furiously back and forth in the high winds. The noise was almost deafening. The ground was covered in greater than 1/2" of ice, making it difficult to try and walk anywhere off the porch.
Guess what happened next? Something I've never seen before. The wind was breaking the ice on the branches into chunks and they were pelting the ground as though they were being thrown there by some crazed giant. Hunks and chunks of ice were landing on the frozen snow covered ground and landing with a thud and a crack. Ice hitting ice. Very hard. Very loud. Very scary. And the pieces weren't small....nooooo, they were golf ball sized and larger. Um, yeah. And that went on for hours.
Needless to say, there was no way Joel could go down to take care of the chickens without taking his life into his hands. Every once in a while you could hear a swift "crack" and then a loud thud as a branch broke off and landed somewhere in our woods. It was truly a dangerous situation.
This was the view of our valley the Saturday morning after the storm. The landscape looks quite beautiful in this still photo, but the wind ripping across the plateau and the loud crack of the ice hitting the ground was unsettling. We were very fortunate that not very many of our branches broke off, just thousands of twigs lay scattered on the icy ground.
We couldn't open the doors on my car. Now why, you ask, would you want to do that? Because I wanted to try and start my car and charge our cell phones. Yes, we needed to charge them in the car because at 5:30am Saturday morning, our power went out. It was really quiet and dark in our house as the storm raged around us outside. And then it started to get really cold in our bedroom.
I'll try and post more tomorrow. You see, it took me 3 hours to upload these few pics because we just got our power turned back on 24 hours ago.....4 days after it went out......and our phone lines and internet are really sketchy right now. Our normally barely adequate internet speed has dwindled down to the speed of molasses in January.
I have a lot more pics to show you, so, stay tuned and I'll do my best to upload them and continue the story of our struggle to stay warm and keep our food cold in the freezers. Yeah, remember all that pork? Uh-huh!
More later,
Debbie
