When the power came on, I was playing my cheap electric piano, and I had hit the wrong key. Which I hit more wrong than right ones, so that wasn’t unusual, but this was an egregious mistake, an E for a C, so I thought I had broke the world. Because the power came on with an audible crack.
Incidentally, that piano I got off eBay for a hundred bucks, a Donner, full sized, merely for something to learn on. This is no solicited endorsement, but the little thing kept it’s charge for a full week, even with me playing every day for about 45 minutes (with headphones). I was amazed.
Power was off three hours shy of one full week. An intelligent person would not have let this bother him, having his generator in hand, well oiled, gassed, and hooked up. Mine arrives next Friday.
For the first day or so dark, last Saturday 29 March, there was still cellphone service, so I was able to get last Monday’s post out. But then the cellphone tower died, too, and the rest of the week was quiet. The computer went to sleep. I was able to charge the cellphone in the truck. An intelligent person would have had a car power inverter ready to go, so things like computers could get recharged, too. Mine arrives Friday. An intelligent person would have at least had one of those battery packs. Mine is coming.
I was cautious with the truck charging anyway, since although by luck I had a full tank of gas, all the gas stations within 45 minutes were also without power. And when some stations got power back, they were quickly out of gas. The Mackinaw Bridge closed for a record-length time and many in the eastern UP had no chance at gas.
The Red Cross worked with the Fire Station and opened that up with beds, food, electricity and wifi. An intelligent person would have checked this early in the week. When I checked on Friday, it was still open. The men running it were absolute sweethearts. Insisted on making us coffee. There were snacks from Buc-ees, though nobody had any idea where they came from (there isn’t one within a thousand miles).
This really is a small town. Everybody knew everybody, and if they didn’t, they knew who knew everybody. Some were better off, some worse. Neighbors were, well, neighborly. Nobody was sour, everybody I met was in good humor, including several tired crews of linesmen and tree removal crews.
I kept the house warm with a fire in the stove, but a low fire, because the chimney gave troubling signs. An intelligent person would have had a chimney sweep take care of this well before the storm. And mine was to come over a month ago, but then he had to have knee surgery. He was scheduled to come on the last day of the storm. His town, smaller than mine, was even harder hit.
It’s Sunday morning as I write this, and at least 10% of the north is still without power. Last Saturday, nearly everybody was out; not only individuals, whole towns. Everything. It was an astonishing storm. But not violent. Just a steady, even quiet, accumulation of ice. Some power lines and branches had an inch-thick coating of ice. It was the weight of all the ice that did the damage.
One man’s front yard, maybe half an acre, looked like the Great Oak Of Heaven snowed on him. There was not one inch left uncovered by thick branches. Many yards looked like a flood had subsided and left a blanket of tree and bush. The main expressway north, I-75, had to be closed for a long stretch. A major electric tower was whacked. Roads everywhere were blocked with trees and power lines. Poles everywhere snapped. The clean up will take a month.
I went for a walk on the second day of the storm, on Sunday, and as I got back home, the top of a neighbor’s red pine exploded off. Sounded like a 12-gauge. You could hear shots going off for days. A cedar collapsed on my shack, but the damage to the roof was smaller than you’d think, since cedars don’t snap, but sigh as they die. There are other trees and branches down, including four cedars that are listing badly in the direction of the garage roof.
All of which means that not only am I a week behind on all work, I have a lot to do to put things back in order. Plus we’re supposed to get 2, 3 inches Monday. So I might have to drop to a two-post, plus class, schedule for a week or so.
Good news is that I got a lot of reading done. Mostly by staying off the interwebs. I did have a peek at Twitter today and see everybody is losing their minds, this time over tariffs. Panic kills, my friends. It may be best to limit exposure to easily outraged voices for a while.
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Happy to hear the good news and life returned to normal and being prepared takes on new meaning.
it sounds like you had an amazing storm! I lived for a time in the Keweenaw and was amazed at the snow we got. I am a troll though, and appreciate not losing power for so long.
That was quite a storm!
Glad to hear that folks up north still can adapt to what nature dishes out. Your story reminded me of the time I was pulled out of a couple snow banks back in April of 1975 in the UP. It sounds like the 2025 storm had more ice accumulation than the one back in 75.
Hope the new hardware installation goes well. We had our generator transfer switch installed before winter. I am glad we didn’t need to use the generator as the juice flowed all winter.
Ice storms have the potential to be apocalyptic. People who’ve never experienced one don’t realize just how completely life changes after everybody loses power for a week or more.
The ice storm of 1998 was so devastating to Montreal that officials were faced with the possibility of evacuating the entire island, several million people. Not only do you lose power, but you lose touch. Radio and TV are out, and unless you’re prepared, the Internet. No stores, no food, possibly no water, certainly no gas. You’re probably cold, and you want to get washed. My sister was going to the local swimming pool for a shower because they had hooked up to a railway engine that kept a part of the commercial area lit.
The family had had the foresight to have a small generator installed, and they cooked in their fireplace. After several weeks, she spotted a hydro truck driving down the street and shortly thereafter the lights came on. The license plates said ‘West Virginia’.
What God-forsaken island are you living on that didn’t have power for a whole week?!? Come back to the USA… even in CA we have electricity! ?
> Mine arrives next Friday.
> Mine arrives Friday.
> Mine is coming.
Well I think that’s wonderful and something to look forward to! \o/ It’s good to treat ourselves to good things once in a while! 🙂
Your chilling tale of trial-by-ice froze my blood. Glad you got through relatively unscathed. Power lines and trees crashing down, skating rink roads, no electric but lots of shortages makes for a rather hazardous holiday. Your survival preps got a good shakedown, see what needs shoring up for the next disaster, natural or man made. Looking forward to posts resuming.
An intelligent person will have a propane generator and a propane stove and a propane fireplace and a 300? Gallon propane tank.
Greetings Dr. Briggs
Good to learn you’ve weathered your storm (though your note does not “sound” like you). As you know, climate is always a factor in our lives; I am living in Arkansas now, and for the past week we’ve been enjoying bone shaking thunderstorms and tornados. I blame Donald Trump for neither the climate, nor the panic engulfing the “Market”.
Often, while completing some, fleeting, disappointment or obstacle, I console myself with an old song by “The Cyrkle” called “Red Rubber Ball”. Try it!
I used to live in a somewhat remote part of a somewhat urban area. The wind was often very windy, and the trees were always very tally. Ice storms were rare, although heavy wet sticky snow was not. There were lots of power outages, but they were fixed quickly, so I got complacent. The first time that the power was out for a few days, I lost two full-sized freezer’s full of food; restocking them made me fully appreciate the monetary significance. Not long after that, the process repeated. So I bought a good-sized generator and the required interface equipment, figuring it would pay for itself after a couple of storm seasons.
But as preparatory efforts always seem to go, my generator purchase caused the situational landscape to remodel itself. The local power company responded to the double-whammy wind storms by initiating a massive tree-trimming campaign. The power company also installed a large substation a few hundred yards away, so if I was out of power, a few thousand other people were also out of power. The end result was that the number of power outages that affected me went way down and the length of those outage was invariably very brief.
About the only thing I did right was buying a dual-fuel generator, gas and propane. This turned out to be important because gasoline engines don’t do well with very infrequent usage and poor maintenance, but propane engines don’t seem to care. I still fire up the generator and run it for an hour or two every fall, but otherwise I ignore it. I have only once used it in anger. After all these years it is just sitting there, still looking as pretty as the day I bought it, laughing at me.
It’s all because of anthropic global warming, and you damn well know it.
Oh, and (P) resident Trump. That guy is supernatural and wicked bad.
The ‘island’ you ask about is the island that the city of Montreal is located on. It was served, at the time of the storm, by seven hydro power lines, six of which were brought down by the ice storm. This storm was a monster, and covered a large stretch of the U.S. and Canadian north-east, putting millions of people in the dark.