We did end up losing electricity yesterday. In fact, it was out for more than 16 hours. We lost branches from a lot of trees out back, too (though not as many as some of our neighbors). Technically the trees aren’t ours…the woods behind our house are owned by the university. So I’m wondering if that means the university will come and clean up the mess? Our next door neighbor has been out with a chain saw hacking at all the branches and entire trees that landed in his yard…and he’s been stacking all the brush together…in the woods (did I mention this is a WOODED AREA???), lighting it on fire and then tossing a cupful of gasoline on the whole thing (after it’s already on fire!), sending flames and smoke shooting through the trees! I can’t stand to watch!
As for the being without electricity for 16 hours…it could’ve been worse. We have a gas fireplace, so we were able to stay warm. (In fact, we also learned last night that our gas fireplace has a safety feature that turns itself off if it starts running too hot…at first we thought the flame was dying because the pipes outside were plugged with ice, which, of course, led to fears that we were all going to die of carbon monoxide poisoning…but no, it was just the safety feature…) We also have a gas stove, so our dinner wasn’t too disrupted. We spent the evening reading by battery powered lights and/or reading ebooks on pocket PCs…and Preteen and I played cribbage. Beats watching TV. And we were still all in the same room.
After being woken up twice during the night by beeping smoke detecters (they’re wired into the electricity, but switch to battery back-up when the electricity is out, so I’m guessing the batteries were dying in some of them), we slept in. And by 9:30 this morning, the electricity was back on.
Hey, we were supposed to get 6-12 inches of snow on top of all that ice, but I think we only got a couple inches. So like I said, it could’ve been worse. It sure was tough shoveling all that ice and heavy snow, though. I got my workout today!
I’m glad you didn’t freeze, Dori. I was talking to a man who builds fireplaces at a party last night. Do you know it is illegal if you have a gas fireplaces to have a flue vent that closes? Because of the CO factor.
Years ago, a fellow student in the M.B.A. program at the University of Utah stopped by his daughter’s house early one morning on a whim, and found his daughter, son-in-law, and all five of their children unconscious from CO poisoning. Another 20 minutes and they would have died.
CO monitors are life-savers. I think he bought one for all his kids.
P.S. Your neighbor is a nutcase. You probably already knew that.
Wow! We plugged our CO detector (not a lamp!) in to this emergency power supply thing my husband usually carries in his car to MAKE SURE we didn’t have CO in the house…it stayed at 0, so we were fine.
As for the neighbors, well…I questioned their intelligence (and sanity) when they built a fire pit in the woods last year! But I guess you do see fire pits in the woods in state parks…and they did take precautions with that (cut down some trees and surrounded it with a huge dirt circle and big rocks). But throwing GASOLINE on a fire ANYWHERE just seems idiotic. Fortunately, the trees that survived the ice storm also survived the burning over there.