My wife's parents have been without electricity since early Monday. Several limbs down from the Pecan trees in the front. Fortunately the cell phone still has battery power and they have a small gas 'space heater.' (Still worries me that they'll get too much CO in their new, much 'tighter' house.) Also, fortunately, they have good neighbors. One of those, a Mennonite family, brought them a generator to run their freezers and refrigerators
AND a delicious, warm, home-cooked meal!
The men of the family also cleared the large Pecan limbs so they can now get out of their driveway! Hopefully, they will have power by late this afternoon,
slightly longer than the 32 hours they were told last Monday.
But they are actually enjoying the change. They have more time to read and talk. And they always went to bed "with the chickens" anyway! They get up with the rooster, too!
In 1994, there was a very severe ice storm in our area. power was out for some folks for nearly two weeks. We did OK for the 5 days we didn't have it. But it was not until about the fourth day that we realized that the water heater was still working just fine, thank you very much. It was, of course, a
gas fueled heater (without any electronic controls, thankfully)! We all took nice warm showers which nicely heated the bathroom! We even called our next door neighbors and invited those with out hot water to come on over while we went looking for some place that had power and was serving food!
Just spoke with them and there are still 3,000 downed power poles around them. Let's see, 1.5 hours per pole...4,500 hours...hopefully there is more than one team working on that...but it's much worse further North! One county utility is still reporting ~45,500 incidents needing repair. Ouch! Of course, utility companies from surrounding state are pouring in all over the affected area. That's pretty much standard practice among them, of course, fortunately.
