Last Friday, June 29, we had a terrible storm. It was called a Super Derecho, and apparently it stretched from Indiana to the East coast. At about 9:30 pm there was a terrible wind. Trees were swaying like in a hurricane. It was said that wind speeds were up to 70 mph. It lasted for about 90 minutes.
Millions of homes lost power, including us. Fortunately, I had saved an old phone which did not require electricity (we also had cell phones, of course). And we had a crank radio and plenty of flashlights. We also had no running water, since we have a well, and the pump needs electricity.
On Saturday morning we could assess our damage, and we were very lucky. With all the trees we have, one could easily have fallen on the house, but we were spared any major damage.
The light on a post in front of our house came off the post, and I will have to fix that. One of the bamboo blinds on the porch got tangled with a hanging plant, and has to be discarded. We just moved another blind to replace it.
Moving to the back yard, the top of a large tree had come down:
And a nearby tree had broken low on its trunk.
The driveway (as everywhere) was littered.
Halfway down the drive, it was blocked by a small tree, which we removed.
Here you can see three damaged trees, between the house and the road. The one in the foreground is the same as the one on the driveway.
We soon discovered that our neighbor Woody had also lost power, as well as the people across the street. However, the people on our other side had never lost power. It turns out they are supplied by a different power company. Those people loaned us a generator, which we used to run the two refrigerators, which were gearing up for company. We also used it to run a fan and a light in the evenings. We could not use it to run our well pump, since that is hard-wired.
Saturday night, we spent at Alice's house. She is the new wife of Woody, and she has not yet sold her house NE of Staunton. It had A/C and hot water!
As time went on, back at our house we got better at managing in our third world country. We filled 7 gallon containers of water at our neighbors. After the first night, we slept in the basement where it was nice and cool.
Most businesses in Staunton seemed to be operating, although many traffic lights were not. Since there had been no warning of the storm, the power company was slow to get going, but finally thousands of bucket trucks started to pour into Virginia. On Tuesday, we started to spot a few near us.
I had been calling the electric company about 3 times each day 'reporting' our continuing outage. On Wed, around midday (after Jane had left for a pre-planned trip to DC), two guys show up and say that I was the only one in our neighborhood to call in to complain (although I believe there were 9 houses here without power). They left, saying they hoped we would be online in an hour. And we were!
Normally, our water passes through an UV light to kill bacteria. The light was out during the outage, and we did run some water (using the pressure in the pressure tank), so there is/was some untreated water in our pipes. When the power came back up, I ran a lot of water to try to get rid of the bad water, but who knows? All of our electrical stuff (computers, Internet connection, etc) seems to be ok.
So, the only residual problems (assuming the electric stays up) are:
- fix the light out front;
- bacteria in water?;
- occasional branches falling out of the sky;
- bees, which got stirred up.
Oh, and were we ever lucky that we had just had that big tree taken down on E Beverley! That would have come down on our house, or someone's for sure.
