Wow. That Sucked.
Merry belated Christmas, guys. Or whatever midwinter holiday you celebrate. I hope it was good for you. I had a very nice time, all things considered. Many thanks for the cards, gifts, and messages of support. It helped all of it to suck less.
After 18 days, I have off-and-on 'net access again. The cable connection is unreliable right now. Obviously, power was the first priority, and they're still working on everything else. I'm terribly backlogged and stressed like you would not believe, so forgive me if I am not quick to respond or if I am slow to catch up on my reading. I'll be making updates and checking my friends list over the next few days, but I really don't know how much I'll be talking back. It's still good to be here again. I missed everyone dreadfully.
It is still a terrible mess here. Fallen wood and sectioned-up trees are stacked in car-sized piles in nearly every front yard along our street. In an empty field on the college campus there is a pile of felled timber easily as long as three city buses and probably close to nine feet high. Cars were crushed, roofs smashed in, fences and outbuildings destroyed. Sargon saw a house whose living room had been cracked like an egg by a fallen tree. Their Christmas tree was hanging out of the gap. The city parks look like they've been stepped on.
Our house sustained nothing more than some slight cosmetic damage, and I am incredibly grateful for that. We lost three smallish trees and one very big tree, though, and had to have the neighbor's trees cut dramatically back from the house all the way along the fenceline. It took the workmen nine solid hours, a cherry picker, and a Bobcat to clear everything out, and there were never fewer than three men working. While they were bringing down the huge maple in the back yard, there were five men with chainsaws, and the 'Cat made continual trips to pile debris in the front yard, then the neighbor's yard, then the other neighbor's yard.
It is very hard to articulate just how bad it really was. This went way beyond "just an ice storm." The storm itself wasn't high-velocity or anything. No howling wind, no wendigos. It was very quiet and very pretty. Sunday morning, before it had built up all day, it was absolutely beautiful to see everything covered in a thin gleam of ice. But it built up, and built up, and kept building up. Ice is phenomenally heavy, and even healthy trees can't always take it.
The tree surgeons I hired worked hurricane cleanup in Florida a few years back, and again after Katrina. They said this was worse than both in terms of tree damage and damage to the power grid; the worst they'd ever seen. It will take months for the city to dispose of all the timber, and there are still people without electricity. My father is one.
People joke that we now know how our forebears lived, but I am quick to point out that people of bygone days had houses designed to retain heat provided by fireplaces and wood-burning stoves. We are in Oklahoma. Our houses are designed to stay cool, and fireplaces or wood-burning stoves are quite rare. Thankfully, it has been comparatively warm. Forty-five degrees isn't any fun, but folks at least weren't freezing to death in droves.
This is still as close to doomsday as I ever want to be. For about 48 hours it was almost impossible to find a store that was open, even if you could get out of your neighborhood past all the downed trees and fallen power lines. Many people had no place to buy food at all because there are few grocery stores in the poorer parts of town, and short of word-of-mouth there was no way of knowing what places were open. For several days there was only one functional emergency room because there was only one hospital with full electricity.
When sirens weren't keening, everything was eerily silent, and the nights were utterly black. I have been in the middle of the desert at midnight, fifty miles from the nearest city, and this was darker still; the constant overcast cut out even the starlight.
That was, perhaps, the most disorienting thing. The utter darkness. It happened right in the throat of the darkest part of the year, too. The light was gone by five-thirty, and often didn't reappear until eight or nine the next morning. That's a lot of dark, and it made the light seem very precious.
I am going to go rest now. I'm trying not to come down with a cold, and my stress levels, as I said, are astronomical. I will be available now, though, albeit a bit sporadically.
After 18 days, I have off-and-on 'net access again. The cable connection is unreliable right now. Obviously, power was the first priority, and they're still working on everything else. I'm terribly backlogged and stressed like you would not believe, so forgive me if I am not quick to respond or if I am slow to catch up on my reading. I'll be making updates and checking my friends list over the next few days, but I really don't know how much I'll be talking back. It's still good to be here again. I missed everyone dreadfully.
It is still a terrible mess here. Fallen wood and sectioned-up trees are stacked in car-sized piles in nearly every front yard along our street. In an empty field on the college campus there is a pile of felled timber easily as long as three city buses and probably close to nine feet high. Cars were crushed, roofs smashed in, fences and outbuildings destroyed. Sargon saw a house whose living room had been cracked like an egg by a fallen tree. Their Christmas tree was hanging out of the gap. The city parks look like they've been stepped on.
Our house sustained nothing more than some slight cosmetic damage, and I am incredibly grateful for that. We lost three smallish trees and one very big tree, though, and had to have the neighbor's trees cut dramatically back from the house all the way along the fenceline. It took the workmen nine solid hours, a cherry picker, and a Bobcat to clear everything out, and there were never fewer than three men working. While they were bringing down the huge maple in the back yard, there were five men with chainsaws, and the 'Cat made continual trips to pile debris in the front yard, then the neighbor's yard, then the other neighbor's yard.
It is very hard to articulate just how bad it really was. This went way beyond "just an ice storm." The storm itself wasn't high-velocity or anything. No howling wind, no wendigos. It was very quiet and very pretty. Sunday morning, before it had built up all day, it was absolutely beautiful to see everything covered in a thin gleam of ice. But it built up, and built up, and kept building up. Ice is phenomenally heavy, and even healthy trees can't always take it.
The tree surgeons I hired worked hurricane cleanup in Florida a few years back, and again after Katrina. They said this was worse than both in terms of tree damage and damage to the power grid; the worst they'd ever seen. It will take months for the city to dispose of all the timber, and there are still people without electricity. My father is one.
People joke that we now know how our forebears lived, but I am quick to point out that people of bygone days had houses designed to retain heat provided by fireplaces and wood-burning stoves. We are in Oklahoma. Our houses are designed to stay cool, and fireplaces or wood-burning stoves are quite rare. Thankfully, it has been comparatively warm. Forty-five degrees isn't any fun, but folks at least weren't freezing to death in droves.
This is still as close to doomsday as I ever want to be. For about 48 hours it was almost impossible to find a store that was open, even if you could get out of your neighborhood past all the downed trees and fallen power lines. Many people had no place to buy food at all because there are few grocery stores in the poorer parts of town, and short of word-of-mouth there was no way of knowing what places were open. For several days there was only one functional emergency room because there was only one hospital with full electricity.
When sirens weren't keening, everything was eerily silent, and the nights were utterly black. I have been in the middle of the desert at midnight, fifty miles from the nearest city, and this was darker still; the constant overcast cut out even the starlight.
That was, perhaps, the most disorienting thing. The utter darkness. It happened right in the throat of the darkest part of the year, too. The light was gone by five-thirty, and often didn't reappear until eight or nine the next morning. That's a lot of dark, and it made the light seem very precious.
I am going to go rest now. I'm trying not to come down with a cold, and my stress levels, as I said, are astronomical. I will be available now, though, albeit a bit sporadically.