Anyway, it was after that 5:30pm weather forecast that we made our first mistake.<\/p>\n
We turned off the television and ate our dinner.\u00a0 And since we are not big television watchers, we never turned it on again for the rest of the evening.\u00a0 We went to bed with our alarms set for 2 hours later than usual and had no idea that forecasters were changing their prognostications hourly.\u00a0 The only update I received in the forecast was sometime late during the night when the power went out.<\/p>\n
“Guess it was a bit worse than they thought, ” I figured as the house settled into absolute silence (no bedroom fans, no fish tank bubblers, no heater swooshing on and off) except for dogs’ toenails clicking across the wood floors.\u00a0 I assumed the poor lineman that lived a couple miles from us was firing up the bucket truck that he keeps parked in his driveway.\u00a0 The search would begin for the line that an overhanging branch or broken limb had disconnected from the power supply.<\/p>\n
Hah.<\/p>\n
Because the power was still off when I was roused for the morning.\u00a0 But it wasn’t the sun peeking through the blackout curtains that finally woke me up.\u00a0 No, there was definitely no sun.\u00a0 Instead, it was the sound of cracking and popping, crashing and thumping.\u00a0 The trees around the house were coming down.<\/p>\n
During the night we’d had a little bit more than 1\/10 of an inch of ice.\u00a0 Quite a bit more.<\/p>\n
Our entire world was black and white.\u00a0 And not the good kind of black and white like that delicious cake they sell at Mad Hatter’s.\u00a0 Mmmmmmm…..black and white goodness.<\/p>\n No.\u00a0 This was black and white badness.\u00a0 Pure horrible badness.<\/p>\n Such badness that you can see some of the pictures are blurred by my tears.<\/p>\n Or else I smudged the lens with my thumb.\u00a0 Eh.<\/p>\n And although tree limbs were still coming down under the weight of all that ice, the worst of the damage had been done while we were sleeping.\u00a0 The damage on our road was so bad that it made all the local papers.\u00a0 The question wasn’t “Where were the lines down?” so much as it was “How will they even find the power lines?”<\/p>\n And “Are there any power lines left intact?”<\/p>\n Of course, the pasture and perimeter fencing had taken a beating, too.\u00a0 Bruno was sitting on the deck, a sure sign that the field fencing was down.\u00a0 Luckily, the goats, the chickens, and the pony had no interest in leaving the warm, dry barn for freezing, icy adventures.\u00a0 The sheep were out nibbling downed branches, cozy in their fleece coats.\u00a0 But my sheep are either too dumb to make an escape attempt or smart enough to know they’ve got it made at the Farm-Of-Never-Ending-Grain.\u00a0 Hard to tell with sheep.<\/p>\n Because I am (forcibly) trained in FEMA preparedness, I made a quick and painful analysis of our situation.\u00a0 There was a very obvious failure in risk assessment.\u00a0 Turns out the groundhog gave a better prediction of cold weather back in February than the meteorologist did the night before the ice storm.<\/p>\n With that failure in risk assessment was an accompanying failure in planning and preparation.\u00a0 We did not have any water set aside for drinking, cooking, flushing toilets, or watering the livestock until power was restored to the well pump.\u00a0 We did not have any gasoline set aside for the chainsaw or the generator.\u00a0 Speaking of which, the generator was at my parents’ house, with 7 miles and approximately 1,000,000 downed trees and 1,000,000,000 downed power lines inbetween us.<\/p>\n With a big fat FAIL in preparedness I decided to move on to mitigation. Fortunately, our farm has a lot of built in capabilities.\u00a0 We had a woodstove which provided heat to keep us warm and a stove to cook food.\u00a0 We, of course, had milk and eggs.\u00a0 We had a large pond which could be used for livestock watering and a small pond close to the house with water to use for flushing toilets if necessary.\u00a0 Even better, we fail to clean our gutters as often as we fail to prepare for storms, so melting ice was running off the roof in floods.<\/p>\n With a few well-placed tubs, buckets, and pans….<\/p>\n ….we had a 3 day supply of water gathered and set aside in just an hour.\u00a0 Who says mitigation requires a 10 page EOP (emergency operations plan) and complicated COOP (continuity of operations procedures)???\u00a0 Use what ya got, people!<\/p>\n Furthermore, we did have cash on hand.\u00a0 I’m pretty sure emergency currency is worth bonus points on a preparedness test.\u00a0 I’m not sure why because none of the stores, including the gas stations, had power so they couldn’t sell us anything if they wanted to.\u00a0 I’m pretty sure milk and eggs make better currency in an emergency than cash (if we had bread, we’d be the Emergency Trifecta Mafia) but I didn’t write the FEMA rules I was just forced to let them scroll by on my computer while I was on Facebook and then bluff through the test<\/span> study them.\u00a0 Regardless, because it was goat selling season and I’ve been too busy to get to the bank with the cash people have given me for kids, I had some cash on hand.\u00a0 Speaking of kids, with the schools closed I had lots of free manpower, er,…kidpower.<\/p>\n You won’t believe this, but kidpower is not officially recognized by FEMA as a system capability.\u00a0 Probably because if you have the time to draft a NIMS Incident Command System that is so complicated it takes 3 hours to study it, then you must only have the national average of 1.5 children to take care of\u00a0 in your household.\u00a0 And it’s probably true that .5 of a child is not an impressive amount of kidpower.\u00a0 Around here there are 4 unschooled children to chip in during an ice emergency.\u00a0 Which meant we could start clearing the fence lines of debris at a rapid rate.\u00a0 Within another hour we had the pasture fence standing in all the locations where we could lift downed branches or limbs and we had isolated the areas where we needed a chainsaw to remove trees.\u00a0\u00a0 Branches and trees continued to come down as we were working, but we only had one close call and thanks to a vigorous basketball season, Middle was way too fast to get crushed by a limb that gave a loud cracking and popping warning before crashing down into his work space.<\/p>\n The Other Half was left with clearing the trees out of the driveway with the chainsaw.\u00a0 We had one tree blocking the top of the drive.<\/p>\n And another blocking the bottom of the drive.<\/p>\n Which might have meant no work for me that night.\u00a0 Except that there was heat, lights, cooking, and showering capability at work.\u00a0 A strong incentive and a win, win for me and my employer!\u00a0 In order to find out if the roads were passable beyond our driveway, The Other Half joined with a group of men cutting trees and clearing the roads.\u00a0 Turned out that our main road was still impassable but one of the side roads was clear.\u00a0 The same side road that the lineman lived on had been cleared in order to get him and his bucket truck in service.\u00a0 Who knew there were these kind of benefits by living near a lineman???<\/p>\n Of course, I didn’t just leave The Other Half in the cold and the dark while I left for central heat, lights, and running water.\u00a0 Per NIMS protocol, the division of Unified Command required a proper transfer of command.\u00a0 Which I accomplished like any other emergency management official by calling in additional resources.\u00a0 In North Carolina a female <\/strong>in the midst of a natural disaster “calling in additional resources”<\/strong> is synonymous with “calling her Daddy.”<\/strong> By the time I was warming my hands at the station, I had arranged for The Other Half to meet up with my dad, pick up his extra gasoline, and transfer the generator to our place.\u00a0 I mean, really, who did you think I was going to call?\u00a0 911?\u00a0 Please.<\/p>\n Daddies.<\/p>\n The Original Disaster Mitigation Association.\u00a0 No taxes, no flow charts, and no chain of command needed.<\/p>\n Once I was at work, I finally got up to date on how dire and widespread the storm damage really was.\u00a0 Without power, we had no idea what was going on in the rest of area beyond what we gathered from neighbors, word of mouth, and Department of Transportation vehicles trying to pass on the roads.\u00a0 The local radio stations appeared oblivious to the situation and with the creation of digital television no one was able to pick up the audio portions of local television broadcasts on AM or FM radio as we’d done in past emergencies.\u00a0 Perhaps, part of IPAWS (Integrated Public Alert & Warning System), besides its cool background music and flashback to duck & cover days<\/a> should have been access to local news media even after the switch to digital television.\u00a0 Oh, sure you could watch the local news on your smartphone.\u00a0 Until your phone battery died.\u00a0 Then you could recharge your phone in your car.\u00a0 Until you ran out of gasoline.\u00a0 You could buy more gasoline with your emergency cash at the gas station.\u00a0 Unless the gas station didn’t have power either.<\/p>\n Oh, FEMA.\u00a0 My milk, eggs, and kidpower look like pretty good mitigation measures right now, don’t they?\u00a0 Yet in your billion pages of preparedness documents, dairy goats are not even mentioned.<\/p>\n Not.\u00a0 Even.\u00a0 Mentioned.<\/p>\n Turned out word of mouth succeeded where the electronic communication failed, though. The Other Half got his info from the feed mill, the gas station, and the few restaurants that were open.\u00a0 Friends and neighbors congregated in these places to check on each other, trade supplies, ask for assistance, and discuss storm damage.\u00a0 Once it was determined that houses and vehicles had been spared, the questions covered the status of livestock fencing, power lines and transformers, and finally, privacy.<\/p>\n “Yeah, ” some murmured mournfully, “the barn roof was spared, and so was the house.\u00a0 But we lost so many trees that now….<\/p>\n (insert sad shaking of the head) <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n ….we can see the neighbors’ place.”<\/p>\n (insert horrified gasp from listener)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n “It wasn’t too bad,” stated another.\u00a0 “At least the vehicles didn’t get hit and that smashed garden gate needed to be replaced anyway.\u00a0 I guess the worst of it is….<\/p>\n (insert forlorn downcast gaze)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n that with the pines down, drivers can see the house from the road now.”<\/p>\n (insert chest grab and agitated, “Oh no!” from listener)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Basically the whole point of living in the country is so you can do the milking<\/span> water the garden<\/span> walk around in your pajamas without having to pretend pajamas are actually clothes (we’re not fooled,\u00a0 People of WalMart<\/a>)\u00a0 because no one can see you.\u00a0 Loss of our natural privacy screens was a big topic among the country folk.<\/p>\n When I arrived at work, I got another dose of intelligence.\u00a0 I learned from my partner that the ice and storm damage didn’t extend more than 10-12 miles east of us.\u00a0 Other co-workers reported there were extensive power outages more than 2o miles west of us.\u00a0 Volunteer firefighters who had been out clearing roads let us know where streets were completely blocked and where they were down to one lane or required vehicles to be low enough to get under low-hanging power lines.\u00a0 In the morning the oncoming crew warned me about the locations of black ice on the roads long before it was mentioned in television or radio broadcasts.<\/p>\n Typically, “black ice”<\/strong> in North Carolina is synonymous with “Yeah, we know the precipitation has stopped but it’s below freezing out there.\u00a0 Below freezing is way toooo cold to go to school or work.\u00a0 I mean, people, please!”<\/strong> In this case, though, the sleet and dripping ice really had frozen in some patches overnight. When I finally got home and went to bed, the situation seemed dire.<\/p>\n Then I woke up.<\/p>\n And I woke up to sunny and 70 degrees.<\/p>\n No lie.\u00a0 It was icy and below freezing one day.\u00a0 And sunny and 70 degrees the very next day.<\/p>\n Oh, there were still a whole of lot of downed trees to deal with.<\/p>\n But it was sunny and 70 degrees.<\/p>\n Which made the chickens feel so good they had a dust bath orgy in the sunshine in the barn.<\/p>\n And made the rest of us feel like this:<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/DSCN3591.jpg\")
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