Surviving An Ice Storm
Enter the Ice Storm of 2007…
Losing power for 13 days was what it took for my skeptic wife to become my Awesome Wife & Prepper Companion!!
It started as a crummy winter day with predictions of freezing rain. I took my wife to work at her 2nd shift job across town. It was shortly after that when the ice storm arrived.
It kept on raining but would stop just long enough for the rain to turn to ice on the trees. I watched the branches begin to hang down farther & farther, until… Snap! That didn’t sound good… Snap!! Wow! That came from behind the house… Snap, Crack Pow, Crack, Pow, Snap. Pow!!! And then it stopped when the rain began again & every time the rain stopped it would start all over again as soon as the rain froze on the trees.
It seemed to get worse every time it happened until it sounded like a war zone with the trees snapping apart from a mortar barrage. This went on for several hours, the power went out & you could hear transformers exploding!
I watched from my porch & saw the trees falling apart, bringing down even more branches as they fell. The rain stopped & the last barrage of trees came but it didn’t sound too bad, because the trees had hardly any branches left to drop.
I had to go pick up my wife. I called her on my cell phone & told her I might be late because I would have to find a clear path to her job. She didn’t even know what had happened. The building she works in is fairly soundproofed & there are no trees near there.
I got lucky when I picked my streets. I chose the ones I knew had few trees near the road but it still looked horrible out there & it seemed that the entire town had lost power.
When I picked her up I told her how bad it was & on the trip back home she said how eerie & creepy it was. Like a wasteland in a movie.
The radio was telling us that more was on the way & when we got home it started all over again. But this time it wasn’t just branches falling, it was also what was left of the trees, power lines & poles.
It took me hours to move branches, cut limbs with my chainsaw & help my neighbors clear our street before I could drive to work that morning. Of course the power was out. My cell phone was dead with no way to charge it to call my boss. Inside the building I work at it was dark & cold and the basement was flooding without power to the sump pump. My boss finally arrived & told me to go home. He would get the generator running to work the pumps & he would call me when the power came back on. The radio was telling us this would be several days & of that I had no doubt.
We lived by candlelight. My neighbor loaned us a kerosene heater which also doubled as our stove for heating up water to wash with. We heated up cans of soup on it for lunch & dinner.
The fridge was cold but outside was all the ice we needed with little bits of twigs inside it. We filled our coolers & set them outside to keep cold. The stuff in our freezer I piled all together, I had no room in the coolers & I was afraid the animals would eat through any boxes I had. As the meat thawed I would barbeque it for dinner & the meat would last longer once it was cooked
During the day I would look for kerosene for our heater with every gas can I had, you couldn’t find any to buy, they were all gone on the first day. I bought a car charger for my cell phone & we built a network for finding kerosene.
Me, my sister, my brother-in-law, my wife & anyone else who we knew needed kerosene. We kept those phones charged & we called each other every time we found a gas station that had kerosene & gasoline for that matter. We bought all we could, filled every container we had.
A woman with a 1 gallon container stood in line for kerosene. That 1 gallon would hardly last her a day. So we scrounged around & finally found her a milk jug to fill. At least she would have enough to last her till tomorrow night.
This went on for days. In the stores it was a nightmare. All the candles were gone, no batteries anywhere, no oil for lamps. When a shipment came in they had to ration how much you could have or some people would take it all. Entire pallets of propane canisters disappeared in minutes. Food in the stores was running pretty low even though some trucks were making it in every day. It was the same in every store we went to & this went on for days. Even with our heater the house was pretty cold. We couldn’t turn it up too high or we would run out of kerosene before we found some more. I had plenty of candles, I had planned ahead for this. We could read books by our oil lantern, I had enough oil to last at least a month, I had planned ahead. We had plenty of food & enough charcoal or wood to cook for a few weeks, I had planned ahead.
My wife, she was a real trooper & didn’t complain or cry till day 12. I really love my wife & give her a lot of credit for lasting that long before breaking down just a bit. She still kept her chin up & knew things were going to be all right. They had power across the street so she knew we would have power also in a day or two.
I had planned ahead but no plan is perfect. I saw the holes & knew I would need to fix them. But now it wasn’t just me doing the planning. My lovely wife was there at my side, helping me fix our plans & helping me to fill those holes. We are working together now. We are making the plans. We will make it together, as a team!
By: Ben (Capt) Cook
captcook999@gmail.com
Comments (2)
I’ll never forget that ice storm and the one of the following year. Using every bit of wood and lumber we could find to burn in our fireplace, which hadn’t been used all my life.
I even built a shack in the back yard and spent many nights cooking things over the fire, the only light in the city as far as I could tell. When the lights came back on, the whole night sky, stars, moon, and all seemed to disappear under the light pollution. I missed it and I was sad it was over.
Then I ran inside and turned on the heat!!! lol
I have survived two ice storms and I never want to go through one again. Fortunately our house was one of the few that was left with electricity. Unfortunately, this meant our house became an unofficial shelter and we were packed!