It turned out that the wires across my driveway weren’t power lines at all. The power line from the street runs underground. I discovered this when I heard a chainsaw out front and saw my incredibly nice next door neighbor cutting up the tree that had come down. He pointed out that the wires were the phone and cable. I couldn’t care less about the cable line because I cancelled my cable TV years ago. The phone line was down on the ground but still connected–amazingly enough. So I thanked my neighbor effusively and at length, and spent 90 minutes hauling the cut wood and piling up the brush. I called Verizon Monday morning and they came and tightened up the line yesterday, so that’s all taken care of. That’s the only tree that came down on my property, too–a lot of branches came off the big row of pines on my east property line, but that’s all a strip of woods so I don’t worry much about it.
I didn’t get out to take many photos of this storm, partly because it was so icy, and I was nervous about wires, so it just seemed dangerous. I didn’t even walk down to get the newspapers until Sunday morning, and I didn’t leave my property until Monday. Since I was hunkered down with the bad weather and the afternoon power outage on Thursday, I was housebound for four days!
Now that I think of it, I didn’t tell that part of the story! Thursday the 11th, as the rain was just starting to really ice up, the power went out for about 2-1/2 hours. It came back on, but from that point, the storm continued to intensify. It was just exactly at the freezing mark (32 F/0 C), but it was pouring so hard, the ice accumulated in drops. All the twigs and wires looked like strings of silver beads for a while. After dark, at regular and frequent intervals I would hear loud cracks, almost like gunshots, followed by a crashing/spraying noise as big branches broke off and came down in a cascade of ice. I couldn’t begin to count how many times I heard this. But the electricity stayed on.
At about 2:00 a.m., I thought I saw a reddish light flaring up out across the street from my house. I wasn’t sure I really saw it, because it would glow brightly and then die down again and disappear. Maybe fifteen or twenty minutes later, I saw it flare up again, much brighter, so it illuminated all the icy branches around it. The tree was on fire! It clearly was tangled up in the power line along the street.
I called the police and reported it, because I wasn’t sure who else to call. They said they’d send someone out. Then I walked down my driveway a bit, in the pouring rain, to flag down the crews in case the fire had died back down when they showed up. I didn’t go near the tree or wire, but I was down by my neighbor’s and she came out on her screen porch to talk to me. So there I was standing in drenching icy rain at about 3:00 a.m. having a nice chat with my neighbor while we watched my tree burning. You couldn’t sleep in this storm, it was too intense. I gave up on waiting for the emergency crew finally and went back to the house. They did show up, and the fire was kind enough to flare up right when they did–but there wasn’t much they could do.
I still had power then, but not for much longer–it went out at 3:40 a.m. I had just gotten all the pattern pieces cut out for the bathrobe I’m sewing for my niece for Christmas. I still haven’t gotten back to that little project, *sigh*.
I did take a few photos on Friday morning when I first got up to check out the damage. By then, the sun was shining, it was above freezing and a lot of the ice was already falling off the trees, wires and other surfaces.
The tree across my driveway–you can see the wires in the lower right quarter of the photo if you look really close. I think one reason for the extensive damage in this storm was that the ground wasn’t frozen. We’d had mild temperatures and lots of rain–the ground was soft mud. This tree didn’t break off–the roots pulled right out of the ground.
Trees on the east side of my yard.
The tree on the west side of my house, nice closeup of the ice accumulation. We didn’t get nearly as heavy icing as they did further west and north–I estimated about 1/4 inch of glaze (that’s about 0.65 cm).