Friday, November 04, 2011

What a week

October 29, 2011 my area in New England got clobbered by a snowstorm that dumped around 12 inches in my town. I was doing pretty well for not losing power even though something like 80,000 already had. Then a transformer on the power lines blew up further down my road. Losing power and even heat wasn't so bad because I had my oil lamps ready to go and candles already burning just in case. I read my Entertainment Weekly and went to bed a little after 11pm.

Then it got really creepy. I could hear trees popping and shattering all around my house because of the heavy wet snow. This snow was the kind perfect for making snowballs. It was also perfect for killing trees. I could hear trees snapping in half all around my house. Two different times I got up and checked things due to the proximity of the snapping sounds and obvious sounds of a tree collapsing. Both times it was my neighbor's. Then at almost 12:30am it was my turn. I heard the tree snap because I couldn't get to sleep. I felt it hit my house and the ground. I got up, dressed hurriedly and ran outside deep snow falling into my workboots and freezing my ankles. A massive branch from my oak tree had snapped off and missed the bulk of my house. It was in my front yard and did no descernable damage to my house. But it did rip the power line from my house to the telephone pole across the street. It also killed my cable wire which mirrored my power supply wire. Fuck. But overall, it could've been a lot, LOT worse.

I went back to bed and eventually went to sleep my nerves having been released by my fear of ill-luck. I awoke the next morning to find my house at 50 degrees. Brrrr. No power, no heat. No landline phones and I hadn't refilled the minutes on my cellphone. Eventually, I packed up some stuff and grabbed my cat and headed for family the next town over. The amount of destruction I saw was incredible. Trees were down every where. I've never seen so many power lines down. We had been hit by a tornado during the summer. That destruction had been bad but limited to a small area in a line. This was everywhere you went.

I made it to my family's house where I knew they had a generator and wood stove. That night the temperature dipped to 17 degrees. Thankfully I was nice and warm in a bed with my sleeping bag. The generator was a good send. The only suckless thing was that the tank emptied after roughly and hour and ten minutes. So it was a constant march down to the barn through deep snow to fire it up every hour we used it. We killed it during the night when were all going to sleep. It was something straight out of the Waltons with the 4 of us going to bed at the same time.

I thought I would have tons of free time to draw and write but I was wrong. One of my brother's enlisted my other brother and our nephew into doing good Samaritan work for our friends and neighbors. This was chainsawing downed trees, snow shoveling and filling tons of water for those that didn't have any running water.

I didn't realize I still had hot water at first. My gas stove was also still powered. But my house had no power and the electric thermostat I guess kept my heat off. Every day I visited my house to shower and it was cold! It was usually 40 degrees. No hair dryer to dry my bushy hair after a shower either.

Still, life was more inconvenienced rather than a struggle for survival.

It's now 6 days since we lost power and we just got it back along with cable tv and internet. Halloween was essentially cancelled due to 100,000+ people not having power and downed power lines all over the place two days after the storm. I have a job ticket for the replacing of the power line to my house but the power company said there is no timetable for that repair. Then I have to get an electrician to hook up the line to my house so I'll actually get power. So my house will be a minimum of 7+ days without power and heat. The crazy thing was, when I finally got a human on the phone from the power company to place my request, a scouting crew arrived at my house literally 20 minutes later to inspect the situation! Crazy. They couldn't tell me when they could get the job done though.

So that's where I'm currently at. Oh yeah, during this, the well at the house I'm staying at died. We had to dig it up and pull the 150 feet of tubing up to check it all. Thankfully we had the equipment and struggled a wee bit but fixed it. Total cost was probably $125 for parts. If we had had to have used a well water company it would've likely cost well over $1000. So for two and a half days the family house had no water.