Kept the home fires burning...

(I started writing this several weeks ago but haven't gotten back to it until now - pictures will be posted in a separate post)

So, as a couple of you know, we got smacked by the ice storm that wandered through last month (12/11), and boy did it suck. We lost power Friday morning about 2:00am and it was restored Monday night about 11:00pm - about 4 days of total outage. (lots of people in MA and especially NH were without power for weeks)

The full details follow...

Thursday night was drizzly and cold, and around 9:00pm I went outside to see what was going on. It was bad and seemingly getting worse. The rain was freezing to the trees and other vegetation and starting to make the trees sag. I glanced up at the imposing pine that stands next to our house (it's well on its way to 80 feet tall, possibly more) and noticed that the top of it was sagging over towards our house. Back in the house, I suggested to Faith that we not sleep in our bedroom as I feared something bad might happen during the night with the pine. She was highly dubious of my fear, but I convinced her to sleep in the guest room on the other side of the house (a few short feet away, but seemingly less likely to suffer a direct hit). I went down and laid on the couch.

I can't recall a more terrifying night in my life. Shortly after turning off the lights the sounds of the suffering trees started. Big loud cracks followed by a shimmering crash like a brush on a snare drum. The trees had begun to lose their the battle with the ice. I got up regularly and looked out the bathroom window, especially after one sounded especially close. Nearly every time I saw the small pine at the top of our driveway drop a limb. A pile of them had been started over the steps/walk that lead down to our house. And often in the distance sounds of more and more limbs cracking under the weight.

Needless to say, sleep was impossible. Between the eerie cracks and my fear that the big pine would drop some major chunk of itself directly on us. Every time there was a groan nearby, I waited with a sense of dread for the giant crack that I thought would proceed the catastrophe. And eventually it came, sort of. Some decent sized chunk of the pine broke of, glanced of the house and make a humongous racket. Everything seemed ok, but my fears had been justified. The threat was real.

The next big event was the power going off, proceeded by what seemed like a pretty big boom in the distance. Whether they were related, I doubt now in hindsight, but it seemed pretty reasonable at the time. This was about 2:00am. Little changed with the loss of power - I was laying in the dark anyway - and the trees continued their ominous demise. There was one other chunk of the pine that came down against the house, again without significant damage. Things calmed a bit as 4:00am rolled around and I managed to doze off until about 6:30am.

Friday morning dawned wet and ominous with clouds. The forecast was for heavy rain most of the day. I threw on some clothes and headed outside to survey the damage. The walk up to the street was entirely blocked by branches and a thick coating of frozen pine needles. I grabbed the camera and took some shots with flash (it was still dark out) but it loses some of the impact. I then proceeded to throw the branches into the driveway and shovel the icy needles off the steps. Once I could get up to the street I could survey the damage a little better. The little pine mentioned above was decimated, and large chunks of it were suspended amongst its brethren and the power/cable wires that run through it. Trees were down everywhere, and my neighbors were out so I wandered over to find that one of the trees between our yards had fallen entirely over and poked a hole in their house. In the scheme of things it could have been much worse, but still, a full sized tree had fallen over at the roots and landed on their house. On the other side of me, the former home of the rope swing, a large maple, had also fallen over from the roots, though this time into the lake. It was not a healthy tree, and the ground at the edge of the lake is not the most stable, but still - it was one of a very few deciduous trees that suffered major damage.

With no power, but thankfully no holes in the house, I decided to go to work. I figured that I'd leave early and try to track down some means of keeping the house warm for whatever period of time we remained without power. News radio (NPR) painted a pretty bleak picture, with hundreds of thousands of people without power in MA and NH and the prospects for a quick return of power pretty slim.

Work was uneventful, spent finishing up some issues and checking the status of the power restoration. Our local utility maintains a website listing the outages by county and city. At the start of my checking my town had about 2000 households without power and over the next couple of hours it steadily dropped before rising again. It continued to rain all day and I dreaded the coming freeze and wind that was forecast. It seemed like unless the trees could shed most of the built-up ice before the wind came, another round of disaster was coming.

I stopped at Home Depot on the way home to get either some sort of propane heater or generator to help to keep the house warm. Of course, everything was gone, which left me with my backup plan, namely to hook up an old wood-burning stove that had been in our basement and which I had recently lugged outside so a neighbor could take it away. Lucky for us, he had been too lazy to get it done. I got home about 4pm with a little bit of daylight left to get the stove hooked back up, though prepared with headlamp and candles if things didn't go as planned. Faith and Primus were headed to warm and lighted environs while I kept the home fires burning.

The stove is insanely fucking heavy, made entirely of cast iron. It's so heavy and dense that I can barely slide it across the floor. What I have to do is remove as many parts as possible (doors, grates, internal fireblocks) and flip the thing end over end back into the house and into place. The parts I got at HD were the wrong ones, but luckily HD had power, so out I went. Back with the right parts, hooking up the flue was a relative cinch and getting the fire started would have made an Eagle Scout weep (1 match, no problem). Thus began the endless night...

Being without power is similar to camping, it always seems later than it actually is, and my job was basically to keep the fire going as well as possible until the power came back on. It was about 50 degrees in the house and I had hopes of maintaining it that way as long as possible with the temperature outside set to drop into the teens with a stiff breeze. Simple physics might indicate that keeping the house above 32 degrees would be enough, but that doesn't account for the wild variations is insulation throughout the house. One little break in the thermal envelope allowing 18 degree air hit a water pipe and boom - catastrophe. Add to that the fact that our heating system is radiant tubing running under all of the floors in the house and you've got a lot of piping to worry about. Thus the goal of 50 degrees.

I set up a makeshift bed on the floor and begasn my vigil. Having slept almost zero the night before, going to bed early was no problem, but I needed to wake up fairly often to check the fire. So, I'd sleep an hour or so, wake up and stoke the fire back to life. Luckily we'd accumulated a decent amount of firewood (used outdoors in the summer) from various limbs that had fallen and scraps of remodelling projects. It was all outside and wet from the days rain and snow, but entirely usable. Every few hours I'd go outside and get another batch of firewood.

And what a glorious night it was. Crisp and cold, with a humongouns full moon. It was extraordinary, except for one major detractor. Half a dozen of my neighbors had generators humming, creating an unbelievable racket on what could have been a magical moment, even given the circumstances. Had it been as quiet as it is when the power is on, but without the distracting street lights, it would have been amazing. Even with the racket, it was pretty remarkable.

Keeping the fire going strong was a pain, and meant another night of horrible sleep. Truly, the lesson of Castlevania proved true again (day has come to vanquish the horrible night). But I did manage to warm things up a little in the house, up to as much as 55 at one point. Still, night was a drag, and I was hoping for a little morale boost from the coming of dawn.

Saturday morning meant a visit to Faith and Primus, a shower and a warm meal. Good stuff, but I couldn't be gone long lest the temperature drop. Saturday was the worst day for weather that were supposed to face, with temps in the 20s and strong winds. Sunday was supposed to warm to the 40s and Monday was also supposed to be good as well. This was going to be the real test.

Almost a month later I really don't remember what I did all day. Primus and Faith stopped by, Primus spending a good portion of the day dozing in front of the fire. I also dozed, my body trying to catch up on lost sleep. Things stayed on target in the house, evening loomed, and Primus and Faith returned to warmer/brighter environs. Another evening spent camping in the house.

One interesting wrinkle to our specific situation...most people have plumbing systems that do not rely on electricity other than to create hot water perhaps. Water and sewer are gravity systems. While our water is a gravity system (all the cold water I could ask for), our sewer is via a pair of pumps in a septic chamber in the front yard. It has some capacity, but its not unlimited, so my flushing had to be greatly regulated. I basically 'let it mellow' and tried to avoid #2 altogether. Not great for a man who is as regular as an English train. Luckily, I had almost no appetite.

Saturday night wasn't as 'glorious' as Friday night had been, and I struggled to wake up often enough to keep the fire going. Even going two hours meant I woke to embers (since it's a wood burning stove you can't put giant logs on it and walk away - plus it's indoors) and had to stoke it back to life, usually a 20 minute ordeal, before I could return to sleep. I had also made a more comfortable bed on the floor and that made sleeping longer easier for better or worse. Even still, the temperature in the house stayed near 50.

Sunday was supposed to be relatively warm - well above freezing. After a respite from the house for a shower and hot meal I returned to fan the flames. In between monitoring the fire I spent time gathering, dragging and piling up the limbs and brush in the yard. The limb poking out of our shed was frozen in pretty well so unless it got a lot warmer, it was going to stay. Luckily, almost nothing in our shed was likely to be significantly damaged by getting wet, because it was we in there. The shed has always been a project on the list anyway, now it just moved closer to the top. This spring would likely bring a tear down and reconstruct - and like the Six Million Dollar Man, it would be even better than before, minus the sound effects.

Sunday evening I snuck out again for a warm meal, but returned to continue the saga. Looking out the window at one point I was sure that there were lights on up a nearby street, or maybe it was just the consequence of someone's generator. It wasn't clear. At about nine pm, after a few more times looking at that light in the distance I decided to take a walk through the neighborhood and see if things were different.

My block is pretty short, and there are about 6 lots to the first cross street that runs up and over a hill and out of the neighborhood. In stark contrast to the houses on the lake itself, the houses up that hill are McMansion-y, with big lots, big garages and big houses. As I drew near to the corner it was clear that the street lights were on up the hill, and once at the corner I could see actual house lights, and yes, even Christmas lighs shining brightly just a few hundred yards from my dark and cold house. Oof. But maybe some hope. Could it be that they were working in the neighborhood? Is it possible that our power comes from the street?

I headed out of the neighborhood via the other street that leads to civilization, and it remained dark. Dark until I got to another of the newer developments, a little tangle of streets tucked in between the hill mentioned above, and the original access to our neighborhood. The streets were brightly lit and the Christmas lights were twinkling. Even worse than my situation, people whose houses were back to back were in very different situations. A few dozen steps separated the world of light and the world of dark. And those damn Christmas lights. A word of warning to future power outage-ees. If your power comes back on, and your neighbor's doesn't....leave your Christmas lights off. It's a slap to the face of those who would kill for a light to pee by, let alone the luxurious lights of celebration.

So it was clear now how the power got to my house, along several dark streets leading to the artery street that feeds this part of town. It was fully lit, but turn down the road towards me and all remained dark, and even worse, there was no evidence of utility workers at all, so I resigned myself to another night of darkness (though with some hope for tomorrow) and returned to my quiet and cool basement eistence. It was still warm though, and not forecasted to drop below freezing all night, so my fire vigil was even slacker than the night before. I even slept part of the night on the couch upstairs.

Monday came, and I schlepped to work with hopes that I might return to the light. Towards the end of the day I heard via Faith from a neighbor that we remained without power but the neighbor was back on the grid, and several of the neighbors were invited over for dinner and some commiseration. So from work I headed home to check things out and then over to the neighbor's for a nice meal and a few beers. No one had any real information about when we might get power back, but it seemed like they were zeroing in on our little enclave. At nine o'clock I was back at home to grab some stuff, but was planning to spend the night with Faith and Primus back in civilization. Again the weather was cooperating and it was forecasted to remain above freezing all night and into tomorrow.

As I got home I noticed a utility truck down the street and wandered down to chat up the workers. I inquired innocently as to their schedule, and the guy came back joking about weeks. HILARIOUS! Lucky for him I was understanding enough to know he'd probably been working almost non-stop for days and so was not deserving of my spite. That and the beers and the prospect of light returning to the neighborhood buoyed my spirits. These guys were charged with basically making sure that everything was in place, clearing the easy limbs, and preparing to put power back into the grid. I was a bit nervous that they weren't going to be able to finish our neighborhood as the little pine at the top of our driveway really needed some work, and the limbs were a tangled mess and laying directly on the wires. They did what they could and drove away. At this point I didn't have much hope for that night and headed off to join the family.

Once ensconced in the glow of humanity I couldn't resist the opportunity to call home on the off chance that our answering machine was back on - the sign that civilization had returned to our house. And holy shit, it answered! We had power! 11:00pm Monday night, after 93 hours (3 hours short of 4 days - which somehow sounds longer) we were back on the grid. I threw some clothes back on and headed home (not to sleep) to make sure that everything was as it should be. What lights were on? Was the heat back on? Etc. I'd actually taken the opportunity of the power outage on both Saturday and Sunday to replace some light switches in the house - both to kill time between fire stokings and to take advantage of the powerlessness.

Once convinced that what was on that should be on, what was off should be off I returned to the family (it was still very cold in our house and we might not have hot water by the morning) and got the best night of sleep that I'd had since Wednesday night the previous week. Ahhhhhhh. I returned to the house first thing the next morning and things were humming fine. And after work that night, life returned to normal....

Advantage of losing power in the winter - food in your fridge doesn't spoil as long as you stay out of it.
Disadvantage - mostly the potential for frozen pipes, something that we got super lucky avoiding, especially since other than Saturday the weather was pretty warm.

Another project to add to the list - adding a generator and transfer switch so that we can join the ranks of the loud, but bright and warm. (actually the newer generators are not especially loud).

Quite an adventure. Much more pleasant than catastrophic flooding, and never did I feel threatened other than the night of the ice storm itself. The rest was just inconvenient, but also occasionally fun.

And now back to your regularly scheduled programming...