well we survived that ice storm fairly well intact. a few large branches are down, some are the size of small trees. but they missed our house, thankfully.
on the other hand, 35 miles up the road, good ol' dependable 'future home of the I-69 corridor' (which i continue to find amusing, what can i say, it doesn't take much)anyway, back to the highway..
35 miles of deccimated forests. they look like big forests of toothpicks. because the tops came down, jagged, and pointy...and the colour of new wood..and with all the branches down as well. the power of an icestorm is pretty incredible. when you get close to some of them, you see the branches in a circle around the remaining trunk. the noise i heard when they came down, i cannot imagine what the denizens of madisonville heard. they don't have any trees left whole. even the evergreens are tilted waaaaaaay over, some at a parallel angle to the ground. its a huge job to clean up, and free all of the power lines, hopefully next year won't be dry as all of that wood will be fodder for forest fires. trees on top of cars, trees still with their broken tops jutting into the road. trees on roofs. just everywhere....what a huge mess.
i've not seen people more weary, wrung out, and at the end of their ropes...than the people of madisonville. insult to injury when the temps took a nosedive, and without heat, some pipes burst...people just want the basics, some heat and clean laundry. as for food, no one suffers in a crisis in kentucky for lack of food in an emergency situation. they take care of each other. the 'cooks' amongst us will cook up lots and lots of food, and take it to those still without power, there were pot lucks at the hospital for the community. hopefully most of the townsfolk have their electric on, and the ones out in the county, well, they've been told it could be two more weeks.
i've been thru hurricane hugo, thankfully my husband didn't listen to me, and prepared, i just knew, growing up in florida, and not having had any bad years in memory at that point, and we were a hundred miles inland. what a mess that was. we had no power for 10 days. made a grill out of a pressure cooker pot, and laid the rack out of the oven over it. put charcoal inside. what's that they say is the 'mother of invention'....?
that happened on my birthday in '89. 09/23/89....twenty years ago this year. we lost electric at 2:10 am on that day. i'll remember that as the clock was stuck that way for a week and a half.
i just never thought it'd be that bad, that far inland. the storm dwarfed the state, the last time we saw it on radar, approaching the south carolina coast, before the cable went. huge. like a big bowling ball. and prior to that, we'd never, ever had years like '04 and '05 in florida when i was growing up! i know my family down there, and most of you guys, were probably so tired of evacuating and putting up shutters. my family came up here to weather the storms a few times. i hope 'those years' never happen again.
then we had that 'blizzard of '93' on my kids birthday, in that year. we were here by then, well in eastern kentucky, and it snowed and snowed and kept on snowing. nearly 3 feet. and it was the first 'blizzard' i'd ever encountered. i just kept hoping the power would hold, and it did. it buried my supra, from the wind, the back of the car and the spoiler was all that showed.
and here, now ice..we've had an f4 tornado really hurt the same county that i work in, and we're really not known for f4's....we're not oklahoma or texas!!!! but the 'disaster tour' after that was bizarre..big pieces of metal, i don't know what from, maybe those metal storage buildings, maybe trailers...but wrapped in the trees like huge pieces of tinsel. convenience store that was gone, but the gas pumps were still there.
i was awake on the morning of april 18, 2008, to honestly feel the 'earth move under my feet' as the new madrid fault reminded us that 'its there'....

so maybe, maybe i'm like jim cantore, you know, bad luck. you dont want jim cantore in YOUR town when a hurricane approaches.