You don't!
Have!
to live like a refugee,
You don't have to live like a refugee.

Actually you do if an ice storm “of Biblical proportions” hits you. 500,000+ without power statewide, 240,000 here in town, including moi.

Usually I'm a real weather geek, checking the forecast and radar several times a day if there is threatening weather coming. This time I wasn't paying attention.

OK, I better fill in the back story:

I rolled out of town last week on my way to California to celebrate dish's birthday. The big winter storm was forecast to intersect me around Flagstaff, Arizona if I stayed on schedule. It looked like I was going to sneak through the high plains just as it started to rain, and before it turned to snow.

That plan took the short bus to nowhere somewhere in Texas, on I-40 near Lela. Don't ask me where Lela is, I still don't know. But it was the last exit I saw before the infamous “Check Engine” light came on and I ended up turning around and slowly limping home on 4 of 6 cylinders.

Home again, I dove into chasing the engine problem down, and woe is me... to the exclusion of watching the big winter storm that was following me home.

I was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of a limb crashing down on the roof. Or, I thought it was a limb. It turned out to be the whole tree. And, that was only the first crash in the night. By the third one, I started wondering what the heck was going on outside and got up early to go look outside. Hmmmmm, it seems I can't go out, this tree is blocking the door.

The Biblical ice storm was under way.

I was pretty well stocked with firewood, fresh batteries and canned goodies because the Harbinger of Doom had already began to waggle its fickle finger last Fall when Accuweather forecast a “mild winter” typical of the El Nino/La Nina 10-year cycle. “Mild Winter” for somebody maybe, but here it always means the jet stream brings moisture from the south and just enough cold air from the north to cover us in ice.

1987: The biggest ice storm on record. I was without power for 10 days. The tropical fish froze solid in the aquarium.

1997: Covered in a sheet of ice. Without power... I forget how long. Plenty of firewood and studded tires on the car. It was survivable.

What year is this? Oh yeah. 2007.

The ice hit most people on Sunday night. I lasted until sunset Monday, looking at the 3 big limbs laying across my lines and cringing every time I heard the sound of the next one; a hail of ice chips when the limb started to break; the crack of another limb giving up; and then the crash of the limb and ice falling. I didn't hear the one that took our block out – it fell 3 houses away from me, accompanied by a transformer explosion. I started shutting down computers to save the UPS battery power to charge the cell phone. I've blogged before about my oldest computer, an '87 386, that had run for over two years without a reboot. The string ended that night at 882 days.

Tuesday, the number of outage reports was still going up while I watched the news on a battery-powered TV by candlelight and the glow of the fireplace. One news report was about a company trucking 100 backup generators a day into town. The '87 outage lasted 10 days and this one was much worse. I decided one of them there generators might be a good idea, so I stumbled out of bed on Wednesday morning to get in what I expected to be a long line to buy one.

Well hey, I got to be ready for 2017, don't I?

When I arrived, I was about 25^th in line. By the time the truck was unloaded, there were about 200 people in line and many had come in, seen how long the line was, and left.

When they wheeled the generator to my car, the two warehouse guys looked at my little Mazda RX7 two-seater and said, “There's no way you can get this in there.” I said, “I'll tear the seats out and push the car home if I have to. If you can get it in the hatch, I got rope.”

So, after a slow trip home with the generator precariously balanced on the hatch opening while I dodged around trees and power lines in the street, (not to mention the people who assume that because the traffic lights are dark, it means they don't have to stop) I had a little power by Wednesday afternoon; enough to run a couple of lamps, a small electric heater and a regular TV.

I was very thankful for that much. Every hotel for 100 miles had been full since Sunday night when the ice started to come and more snow was forecast for Friday. With my all-wheel drive car busted in the garage, I didn't trust the “antique” tires (as a tire guy called them ) on the Mazda to get me far on bad roads during a disaster.

I was expecting to be out of juice for a long time. The '87 ice storm wasn't this bad and it took 10 days before I had lights again. It was a nice surprise to see a line crew from West Virginia gathering on Saturday night and it demonstrated how much better prepared the utility company and city were this time.

The local news had been covering how 2500 line crew workers and 1000 tree crew workers had been rolling into town. They were housed at temporary headquarters at the Fairgrounds, in what we call the I.P.E. building, a huge barn of a place, big enough to build a race track, grandstands and pit over 100 race cars and crews inside during the winter. They slept on cots and ate cafeteria style. The horse racing track was taken over as the command center and the TVs that usually show parimutuel betting lines were patched into the software that collected trouble calls and prioritized repairs to get the most customers back up again in the least time.

These crews came in from as far as 1000 miles away in trucks that couldn't have been a very smooth, luxurious ride. They slept barracks-style with thousands of other workers and worked 12-hour days. Now they were outside in the dark in 10 degree wind chill, in buckets, handling live, wet wires. Man, I hope they got paid really well.

While they worked for the next 2 or 3 hours, I could hear the constant radio traffic to the dispatcher at the Fairgrounds HQ, more like air traffic control at a busy airport than anything else. Refueling and even parking was coordinated by radio. The efficiency and organization was impressive.

The news also reported on the FEMA arrival. We saw video of generators... just sitting... as the reporter outlined the paperwork and bureaucratic hoops that people would have to jump through before they got help. It was reported that FEMA was handing out bottled water – but that seemed to be the only thing we had plenty of. The contrast between how the city government and utility company moved into action and the image of people sipping their water as they filled out FEMA forms was... uh... striking.

Today, 95% of the city is up and running again. Most of the downed trees and power lines are out of the street. Here and there you see a homemade cardboard sign by the road, begging the utility company to stop there. The utility and tree trucks are still moving in and out of the Fairgrounds, but the sound of fire and ambulance sirens has ended. 20 people are dead, mostly from “trying to stay warm” accidents.

Hurricanes never come this far inland, but we got a glimpse of what it's like to live through one, with its widespread and crippling destruction; food and supplies on the other side of the walls of closed stores; police patrolling to discourage looting; people helping people, and people with short tempers.

For me its over, except for a lot of dead wood in the back yard and that dead car in the garage, abandoned in mid-repair. I got a week's worth of laundry done today, replenished my refrigerator and got my computers patched back together – the power strips got reassigned to the generator during the outage.

The moral to this story? I guess I don't got one... except that there are some days that you light a candle AND curse the darkness.