Hobbit
Senior Member
I've just come out of the worst ice storm since the one that left much of Memphis powerless for weeks. More than 100,000 homes in the greater Atlanta area were out of power.
At 4:45 this morning, my UPS (Uninterruptable Power System) started beeping, meaning power had been cut off. Our power was out, and soon, my room was too cold to sleep in without extra blankets and I'd been awake long enough that trying to return to bed was futile. At about 5:30, I gave up and joined my mom in the living room next to the wood stove. For about an hour, we sat in the living room with nothing but two candles for light, talking and listening to trees snap, one by one...starting with one in our back yard. Only our side of our street was without power, so we weren't too worried. At 6:30, the power began to flicker on, but then it cut off, along with the power to our entire side of town. I spent most of the day in the living room, reading, talking, listening to trees crash, one at a time, and loading the stove. We heated up some leftover barbeque for lunch, and we took the muffins my mom was going to give to her students (school was cancelled) down to the closest fire station as a token of our appreciation of the LOOOOOOOOOOOONG day they were having (along with the trees, we heard a siren about every 15 minutes). We also drove by the grocery store where I worked, since the roads weren't bad and we wanted to see the extent of the damage. Between us and the store, 3 blocks away, were 6 downed lines of various types (power, cable, phone) without even a crew out there yet, along with, literally, many tons of fallen trees and branches. All the stoplights were out on the street, and the grocery store, without power, was selling off the last of its milk and shipping everything else perishable back to the warehouse (interesting day for me, tomorrow. I was off today). We heated more leftovers for dinner and then took showers with the little hot water left...before that chilled over, too. The two of us had some hot chocolate and read by the light of a propane lantern and were about to go to bed in the living room (with the wood stove) when the power finally came back on, at 9:30, almost 17 hours later.
It's no Katrina. It wasn't even half as bad as the big one in Memphis, but dang, it was a doozy. Right now, I'm listening to the trees straighten back out, now that the ice is falling off. Anybody else in the Atlanta area experience this badness? Better yet, anybody remember the Memphis one about 10 or so years ago? Snow is bad, but dang, it takes some nasty freezing rain to really screw a place up in winter, but good.
At 4:45 this morning, my UPS (Uninterruptable Power System) started beeping, meaning power had been cut off. Our power was out, and soon, my room was too cold to sleep in without extra blankets and I'd been awake long enough that trying to return to bed was futile. At about 5:30, I gave up and joined my mom in the living room next to the wood stove. For about an hour, we sat in the living room with nothing but two candles for light, talking and listening to trees snap, one by one...starting with one in our back yard. Only our side of our street was without power, so we weren't too worried. At 6:30, the power began to flicker on, but then it cut off, along with the power to our entire side of town. I spent most of the day in the living room, reading, talking, listening to trees crash, one at a time, and loading the stove. We heated up some leftover barbeque for lunch, and we took the muffins my mom was going to give to her students (school was cancelled) down to the closest fire station as a token of our appreciation of the LOOOOOOOOOOOONG day they were having (along with the trees, we heard a siren about every 15 minutes). We also drove by the grocery store where I worked, since the roads weren't bad and we wanted to see the extent of the damage. Between us and the store, 3 blocks away, were 6 downed lines of various types (power, cable, phone) without even a crew out there yet, along with, literally, many tons of fallen trees and branches. All the stoplights were out on the street, and the grocery store, without power, was selling off the last of its milk and shipping everything else perishable back to the warehouse (interesting day for me, tomorrow. I was off today). We heated more leftovers for dinner and then took showers with the little hot water left...before that chilled over, too. The two of us had some hot chocolate and read by the light of a propane lantern and were about to go to bed in the living room (with the wood stove) when the power finally came back on, at 9:30, almost 17 hours later.
It's no Katrina. It wasn't even half as bad as the big one in Memphis, but dang, it was a doozy. Right now, I'm listening to the trees straighten back out, now that the ice is falling off. Anybody else in the Atlanta area experience this badness? Better yet, anybody remember the Memphis one about 10 or so years ago? Snow is bad, but dang, it takes some nasty freezing rain to really screw a place up in winter, but good.
