Ice Storm - Part 2

Here is the rest of our ice storm story. Before we left on Wednesday, we packed up as much frozen and cold food from the fridge as we could fit and took it with us to try to salvage it. Some we actually ate and some traveled with us for 3 days.
On Thursday morning, we started calling the house at 8:30 and about every hour after that. Around Noon, Kevin called and the machine picked up. I called a neighbor and she said it had been back up about 30 minutes. So we ate lunch and began packing up. At 3, with the car loaded, including the boys, Kevin called just to make sure it was still on - and it wasn't!!! It had gone back off, but we figured it was just to bring others in our area back on line and decided to come back anyway. When we got back, it was still off and we sat in the dark house, getting colder by the minute, waiting on our friends to get back from Little Rock. They did have power so we went to spend the night at their house.

Around 7, I called the house and the power was back on, but we went ahead and ran to pickup some dinner. On our way there, everything that had been off earlier was back on, street lights, stores, etc. We drove through Burger King and as we came back through, everything was off again - so I called the house and sure enough, no power. We were scared her power was off too, but it was still on. I called the house again around 10:30 and still no machine. Friday morning we began calling the house again. Early in the afternoon I ran to the house to check on things and called the power company just to make sure they knew our subdivsion was out although the highway had power (our power is underground). They assured me they did but filed another work order. Late in the afternoon I discovered that the front of our subdivision had power, just not our street. So I called again and assured the lady that our power was underground and connected with the front street. And 1 1/2 later, our power was on. But rather than risk coming home and losing it again, we stayed one more night at their house.

The following morning, I came home and cleaned our fridge from top to bottom, throwing out everything that had gone bad, which as you can see was basically everything in the freezer and all perishables from the fridge. I figured at least our fridge got a really good cleaning!

Later in the afternoon, we took a look at our trees to see if they could be saved. We staked them up and we think they may make it.

As you can see, they are still really leaning, but part of that is that we need some stronger rope. We're going to get them tied up a bit better this weekend, but at least they are upright.

We are very lucky. That was the only damage we had, but we have trees only along our back property line. Some in our neighborhood had large limbs on their roof and lost entire trees. This is the pile of limbs from our neighbor across the street.

Piles like this are all across Jonesboro. I was kind of amazed as I drove through town today and the piles of limbs that people have stacked along the road. I told Kevin, we should collect all the limbs from our neighborhood and have one big bonfire. Not sure what the fire dept. would say about that. As of Monday night, many in our city are still without power, including one friend who would love to get her power back! Kevin is also still without power at work. They installed generators so they could have lights and computers, but do not have heat. He luckily works beside the server room which is its own heat source, so he's not too bad off. He is actually working in the server room so that another employee can have his desk. They have heard they may get power on Friday, but that is left to be seen. The city where he works lost the main transmission lines coming into their city and are having to rebuild those lines. This has been an experience for us unlike any other and one I hope to never repeat. But living in Arkansas, it's like Kevin says, it's not a matter of if, it's just when.