Ice Storm 2009-RIP (Please RIP!)

Today was the one year anniversary of the ice storm that knocked our socks off last year. Actually, it knocked out the lights and sent us all into a crisis like most of us had never known. For up to three weeks, people did without electricity, scrambled for supplies like gas and kerosene and longed for simple comforts like heat and a hot shower. They cooked food on grills and huddled together under multiple layers of clothing and blankets to stay warm in forty degree houses. Before it was over, the National Guard was called in and everyone in a sixty mile radius had begged, borrowed or stolen (literally, in some cases) a generator. It was a crazy time.

Since I work for an electric company, my life was turned upside down in many ways. I worked around the clock for the first couple of days and then settled into eighteen and twenty hour shifts, doing everything from relaying information to the media and coordinating our response with local government to answering phone calls from desperate customers. I rarely saw my family. It was nearly a week before I saw my house in the daylight. It was the most intense work experience of my life, and that’s saying a lot since I used to work in television news, and my time in that career included covering a school shooting that killed three students.

We were without electricity at my house for eighteen days, and by that last day, we were getting pretty worn down from the experience. Hubby and Teen Angel were tired of the daily grind of doing without a lot of creature comforts, and I was just physically and mentally exhausted from work. It was a time that we will never forget and hope not to experience again.

In the past few weeks, people started mentioning the anniversary of the storm to me and joked a lot about it. I politely smiled and laughed, but frankly, I didn’t find it very funny. The comments about the anniversary picked up the closer it got to today, and the local news outlets were all over it yesterday and today. God love ‘em, they can’t help themselves, but I just don’t want to relive it. It has literally taken a year for me to catch up on everything that got out of whack or off schedule because of the ice storm.

I took about 400 photos during the crisis and the recovery stage, mostly of our folks at work. Some of them will appear soon in a local book that’s being published about the storm. During the storm, I longed to spend days stomping around, taking pictures of the ice, but I only had time to grab quick shots of the things that happened around me while I was working. I managed a few beauty shots, though. I share those today, as a way of giving you a glimpse of what things were like around here during that time, but mostly it’s my way of putting that storm to bed. I’m done with the storm. Finished, kaput, over it. I will share stories about it with friends and family in the coming years, but for now, she’s a dead issue for me. Take a last look, ‘cause these photos are going into an album for the grandkids.