After I picked the kids up from school on Thursday, I filled the car with gas and bought some extra D batteries. I also bought a few snacks for the kids. We were fine with food. I thought about buying some Duraflame logs but we have not used out fireplace since 1999 so I decided against it.
We had driving rain and the wind started to pick up. Our book club decided to still go out for our Christmas dinner celebration even though the winds were high. The big storm wasn't due to hit until after 10pm so we figured we would be home safely by then.
While I was gone, the power went off at our house so Stephen let the kids sleep in the living room. About 10:30pm, the gate and one section of our fence blew down and hit the side window to the living room but fortunately did not break the window (you can see where the screen was damaged by the fence in the picture):
Of course there was no school (or work) on Friday morning because more than a million homes were without power. We decided to take a look around and this is what we saw:
This tree was well over 100 feet tall and very thick. My friend lives directly to the right of the house where the tree stood. She did not allow her kids to sleep in their bedroom that night because she was worried about this tree. It fell the other way though. These people decided to sleep in their downstairs (on the other side of the house) that night. The tree fell at 1:30am, crushing their bed and crashing straight through to the garage.
This house is across the street from the park which backs onto the school yard. It was hit by 4 trees. You can see the blue tarp on the roof. Their car was also crushed and had just been towed down the street so that crews could get to the power lines and trees. The log in the lower right of the picture was a utility pole that had toppled but was already chopped up into three sections.
This is just one of many streets where the power lines were down and laying across the roads. This street runs perpendicular to the park. A person I know told me that earlier in the morning you could not even look down the street because of all of the trees.
By Saturday morning it was 57 degrees in the house. I took the kids to Safeway in the early afternoon (they had generators to power their cash registers but no lights in the store and they were not selling meat, dairy or frozen foods).
The rest of the day we just hung out, cooked meals on the grill and the power outage was seeming a little "old". Ash and Gar packed it in and decided to drive to visit his sister in Portland. They left us some duraflame logs and the propane tank to their grill since ours was running low. By early evening, the house was 51 degrees. We started burning the duraflame logs, hoping that we would not have a chimney fire because we do not use our fireplace at all. At 6:30pm, our neighbour across the street told us to come over because he bought a generator and had light and heat (space heaters). We went over and watched a dvd. We got home, bundled up and slept in front of the fireplace (which really did not give up much heat).
This morning it was 47 degrees in the house. On the way to church, I noticed that the Shell station had power (and 20 cars in line for gas). Some of the traffic lights were running on the main street. No power in church though. The power came back on about an hour after I arrived home from church.
Now, this week I will be finishing up my Christmas shopping and also re-stocking our emergency supplies. And calling a chimney guy to check out our fireplace and chimney to ensure it really is safe to burn logs. BTW, the wind-up radio I bought after 9/11 worked really well but I am going to buy one that lasts more than 15 minutes on a charge. I already had this one on my Christmas list, which I am sure now Stephen will consider buying me (before the power outage, he told me we did not need another one). :)
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