Ice, Ice Baby

Thursday into yesterday we had an ice storm that hit NH almost as bad as the storm 10 years ago. Fortunately, though, the roads weren't too bad, but ice formed on so much stuff that there were downed trees and power lines blocking roads everywhere. We went without power off and on during Thursday night, but it went out for the day at about 4:30am on Friday. John got up to check on our sump pump, which the well was full. He bailed out some of the water, but it was useless. At 5am we both got up, and bailed out more water, but it was coming in just as fast as we could get it out. At about 8 in the morning, our good friend, Jared, came over to help us with the water, because I needed to keep an eye on Hannah. Because we had turned the heat up in the house during the overnight, it wasn't freezing in the house, but it was below 60, so it was getting chilly. The storm didn't last long, but we were without power until about 6:50 Friday night, when PSNH played a cruel trick on us - our power was on for about 30 minutes when a transformer blew (I saw the explosion out the window, and John and I both heard all the noise) and we were without power again. We had only been able to get the house warmed up to about 60 degrees before it went out again. We had dinner out at a Chinese restaurant to thank Jared for all his help (he stayed all day to help bail out the water), so it was good to get a hot dinner and get warmed up. I took Hannah out in the car during the day too so she could get warmed up and we could pick up some groceries - we did manage to find one store that was open and running on a generator. No heat though, which was kind of a bummer.
We have a neighbor with a generator that let us plug our sump pump in with an extension cord while the power was down, which was a life saver for John and Jared.
Anyway, we got our power back last night at about 10:45, but the sad part was that we forgot to switch our sump pump off the generator and back onto the power, so when our neighbor shut off the generator, we had no pump. Oops. Needless to say, we woke up to a flooded basement. It wasn't terrible, and we've finished the clean up already, it's just still a bit damp. At least we had the forsight to tile our computer room floor.

Anyway, here are some pictures from the damamage at our house:This was a branch that broke off our pine tree in the front yard. Part of it was sticking out into the road, so the town helped clean some of it up.

This is out back yard with some branches down all over the place. We have some massive clean up to do today.

The branch you see behind our grill next to our clothes line actually damaged our chain link fence. How it didn't hit the house, we'll never know.

The lovely fence problem...

Our broken down front yard tree again.

The fence again. Remember that you can see our clothesline in this picture.

More back yard damage...

A kind of blurry picture of the "damage" a branch did to our roof. Fortunately, it also didn't do anything structural.

Remember that clothesline you saw earlier? Yeah, it's gone. Another branch fell, narrowly missing John, and took out our clothesline.



The ice on our honey suckle bush.

Icicles on the deck

The honeysuckle



Trees that are ice covered.