We had a big ice storm rip through The 716 the night before, and it had the usual effects of ice storms: thick coatings of ice on everything, resulting in tons of power outages from lines collapsing, or tree branches collapsing onto lines, and so on. We were without power at home for thirteen hours, starting about 1am Thursday morning. Luckily I slept through a chunk of that, and then I went to work, so when I got home the power was back on.
Oh, and that modification I made a few months back to our back-up sump pump? It worked! My extra-long pipe discharged the water far enough away from the house that for most of the outage we avoided the recirculation problem and thus the backup was actually able to cycle, rather than run continuously. Eventually, however, that amount of water still started making its way back in, so I added the other ten-foot length. And even that eventually wasn’t able to discharge the water far enough away to keep it from making its way back into the pit, so we’ll need to make a permanent fix at some point and tie the backup sump discharge into the main storm line. That’s a problem for another time, though.
Meanwhile, the landscape itself after the ice storm took on a quality we don’t see all that often, since we don’t get ice storms like this too frequently. Some of the trees started to look like something out of Doctor Zhivago. And everything sounded differently, too! I actually thought to record some of this, hence the video below. First, my feet, stomping not through snow but a thick crust of ice. Second, removing the ice shell–more than 1/4-in thick–from the railings of our deck. And third, from late last night, when I went to let Carla out for her last bit of outdoor business before bedtime. It sounded like it was pouring out, and she tried to come right back in, but I gritted my teeth and stepped out with her…to discovered it wasn’t pouring or raining or anything at all. That was the ice in the trees, breaking through and raining down.
I’m not a fan of ice storms, but they do make the world look and sound very different….
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It wasn’t as impressive as yours, but was ice in the 518. It snowed maybe 3″ on Wednesday night then the ice came. Usually, I’m the “shovel the snow right away” school, but I feared it would mean black on the sidewalk. So I shoveled Thursday morning. I would rather have shoveled a foot of wet snow because chipping away was a PITA.