Okay, maybe this post's title sounds a little over-the-top, but this past week has been a weather ordeal unlike anything I've had to deal with in this area (Buffalo, NY). There have been sensational overestimations of the trauma in some saying, "This is our Katrina!," but that is far from reality. But practically everybody has a story from this mess, so I'll tell mine.
The night of Thursday, 12 Oct 2006, I was working a little late and drove through a lot snow, car accidents and drivers about to cause more damage to arrive at my Southtowns home at 8:00. There was no snow on the ground at my house. This was itself an anomaly, in that the Southtowns (literally, the towns South of the city of Buffalo - hey we're pragmatists) usually get socked with the white stuff well before and way worse than our anchor city immediately North.
My wife and I had dinner, watched a little TV (season one of Lost on DVD, I think), and turned on the back floodlight at 11:00 when the dog showed some interest in what was going on back there. And interested she was - in the five inches of snow on the ground. While she romped in her Winter playground, we marvelled at how our town must have gotten the storm second for once, and went to bed.
At midnight, we saw bright oranges flashes that appeared to be right outside our bedroom window. I was fairly convinced that some lines were coming down and, judging from the brightness and color of the light, they were down from our house and potentially starting a fire. So I rushed down, got into my kick-arse Sorel boots, put on the light Gap jacket that was sufficiently warm a few hours before, and headed toward what I tohught to be the source of the light. Nothing. My neighbor was up investigating the same thing, and while we stood there bright blue and green lights flooded the sky, apparently eminating from four miles West over Lake Erie. We thought it was perhaps transformers blowing on the other side of town, closer to the lake.
There was then a faint humming sound, thunder, some lightning flashes, the sound of trees falling... It didn't feel safe. We estimated that her cousin's car would probably be safe parked in the street under the large maple tree at the curb, but that my Outback needed to be moved up about five feet away from our large birch tree. The reason? It was officially Friday, 13 October 2006 by now, and apparently nobody had told the trees to shed their leaves before the first snow came. So this massive amount of really, really wet snow was stick to the leaves. No big deal, right? Well, my 80-foot tall birch tree was literally bent over unto a "U", making it about 30 feet shorter. We talked ourselves into going back into our homes to wait it out and hopefully get some sleep.
At 6:00am, I got up, automatically got in the shower, and started getting ready for the day. At around 6:20, my coworker Michelle called my cell to ask if I'm going into work. I looked out a window to see even more snow, bent-over trees, and more limbs down than in a Roman bath. We were starting to lose the connection, so I hung up and we used SMS for the rest of our short conversation.
The time was now 6:30 and my wife turned on the local news to see how extensive the damage was. Just as the newscaster said, "Count yourself lucky if you've still got power," the TV went dead and everything else did, too. My boss lives really close to the office, so I thought he would have the best sense of what was going on near work and whether or not the office was opening. At the words, "Uh, don't worry about coming in. If anything changes, I'll call you. I need to get the fallen trees and 15 inches of snow out of my driveway now..."
[Call to NYSEG: "There is no estimated time of repair."]
So that was that. It was cold. We toughed it out for a while, but then went to our friends' place around the way to keep warm by a fire all night. At around 10:30 that night, their power came back. Excellent! As we drove home, all 2600 feet, fewer and fewer street lamps were lit. Of course, no power in the Fending household. The dog was happy to see us - more body heat in bed.
[Call to NYSEG: "Estimated time of repair is noon on Monday, October 16th."]
The next day was similar, and we dropped our cell phone with our friends around the corner before heading to get a bite to eat (THAT was fun - try find an eatery the day after a power failure...), stop at Wegman's for some supplies, and head back to the warmth of our friends' house for dinner and an evening of waiting for our power lines to come alive. We got home around midnight, still had no power, and vowed to give it another day.
[Call to NYSEG: "Estimated time of repair is 10pm on Tuesday, October 17th."]
By noon Sunday, we were on our way to Rochester for what we thought might be a couple of days of long commutes back to Buffalo. We sat down to dinner, and fully expected to sleep in a warm bed, just not our own. At this point, I called our house and got the answering machine. By midnight, we were home to a warm house.
The next day, the rest of the region was fairing a bit worse than us and carbon monoxide deaths grew to number in the teens. As I write this, there are still towns in our county without power, and politicians have begun the finger-pointing that they do so well. (Not surprisingly, the harshest of fingers are in the towns with the weakest response. Well, it is an election year.)
So that's more or less the story. Oh, and I think we're going to lose the 45-ft tall silver maple in the back yard. But if that's the only casualty in our household, I think we'll count ourselves lucky.
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