Ice storm and no school

Yesterday, Monday February 16, we had a cold rain which turned to a sleety-chilly ice pellets all night. Of course the trees and power lines were immediately blanketed with a thick coat of ice. At 10 PM the power went out.

I had been looking at the Georgia Power Company's outage map and had seen the large outage to my south by a half mile, and the large outage to my east by a quarter mile, so I had no illusions this time that the power would go out. We usually escape here in this lucky location, but not this time, it seemed.

So I dug out the kerosene lamp, trimmed the wick and filled the well. I got the flashlight out, inventoried the priority food in the fridge, and made sure I had all else ready in case. A few minutes later after preparations were complete it did go out. By then it was 10 pm and all I had to do is go to bed.

It was a restless night, with the creaking of overloaded branches hovering low over the roof. At 2:15am a nearby transformer blew. The light was white and bright like a mini-atomic bomb, and the noise, despite being at least a mile off, was very loud.

At that point the power had been out for 4 hours, and I decided that with a nearby transformer gone that it would be many more hours before it came back on. I got up and dumped out sheets and towels from a plastic bin stored in the bedroom closet, and loaded all the prepared food I had in the fridge such as quiche and potato soup etc, plus all the dairy. I tucked it outside the door. Temperatures were hovering just at freezing and the bin being nestled against the wall with the residual interior heat coming out, I knew that the food would not freeze.

At 10:30am the power clicked back on. At one point, 180,000 were without, mainly Atlanta and NE GA, where I am. There are still many without power but with the ice falling off the branches I hope the worst is over. We had no school today due to the fact that one school had no power and many secondary roads were filled with downed power lines and branches, making safe transport of children difficult.

I walked around the yard this morning and took some pictures. Here they are.