December Icestorm 2008

I imagine that this date will go down in record books for the power outages associated with it. I am legitimately writing this entry late, since our power went out for one entire week! I've got a good deal to write, and I'm trying not to get too busy or too sick to get it all online, so, I'll post in chunks. First, of course, the pictures I snapped Friday morning. I took them on a whim, not realizing the extent of the damage to New Hampshire.
 
One of the trees on our property that went down overnight. E chopped it up for firewood. It's difficult to see, but many grass blades are sheathed in ice.


Our larger trees in the backyard, ice covered and a little bit creaky. I later discovered that it only takes a half inch of ice accumulation on branches/foliage to bring down a tree. The one that wiped out our power lines was about the size of the pine tree in the middle.

  The beauty of an ice storm deceives. I always thought that storms that caused major outages required mountains of snow. Everything looked like a fairyland this morning. You'd never realize how damaging it was until you moved away from the house--branches strewn everywhere, trees bent over or snapped in half, bushes completely collapsed--many roads were impassible.

 I reget that I didn't take more pictures of the neighborhood debris. Lawns were littered with dozens of clumps of pine branches like this. We could have made a good sized Christmas tree from all the ones on our property.

 A shot of the thicket behind our house. If anyone had to crunch through this stuff to fix a line, they'd have some very hard work ahead of them.