Ah, a brighter day! We were at my nieces house, toasty warm with plenty of food. The little cousins played games and they had a great time together. The rest of us sat and talked, slept, or watched movies. I caught up on some much needed sleep, I was really exhausted. I had to worry whether our pipes busted or if the food in the freezer was ruined. It was cold but was it cold enough to stop bacteria from getting into the food. As soon as someone lets us know the electric is back on we’ll have to go straight home and find out.
You can tell things were getting better by the color of the sky. The mail carrier came by to deliver mail. Out of the house I come running, waving my arms to flag her down and ask if our town has electric yet. She said no. No electric and news reports said it would be days before electric is restored. My heart sank. She asked what we needed and took our phone number list to call our family to come and help us out. We have cars, but went to town to find no electricity the second day and then thought we should go to the next town where Wal-Mart is located only to find a ghost town. No electric, no McDonald’s food, no stores open, just plenty of snow and plenty of people needing the same things. We had enough gas to get home and hopefully back to town. Now the mail carrier, God bless her heart, was our life line for getting family to come and help us. However, back to giving her the phone list, we were not sure our family could be contacted since these outages went city to city, and state to state. We live along the Ohio River across from Kentucky and everyone knows how hard many of those places were hit.
Check out those long icicles and the thick ice on the roof with a blanket of snow. There was icicles hanging from branches, trees, and everything that the ice could freeze up on.
Electricity was out at my house a few days, short in comparison to my neighbors across the road on a different power grid. All across P. Mountain no one had electric. A few people had back up generators, some had wood burning stoves, and others had propane heaters or fireplaces. There were the lucky ones. Our neighbors across the road had a nice generator with fuel, but they didn’t get their electricity back for a week and a half.
The siding had its own frozen coating and mini icicles in-between. Pretty amazing that it could cover so much all around. The good news is my niece lives near a electric substation, which would be one of the first houses back on in case of a blackout. Also in her favor is the fact that she does not live in and around a forest like us. She was my neighbor, until a few months before the storm, when she and her husband bought their new home and moved 30 miles away.
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