We were lucky and lost power only for a few hours on Sunday, plus maybe five short outages of only a couple of minutes each. Two or three big branches down in the backyard (attracting at least three cardinals to hop among them on Monday morning), a couple of smaller ones in the front, lots of twigs and leaves on the ground. Some damage to the fence. We put everything away except the barbecue, but neighbors who left things stacked by the side of their house, or left chairs and tables (I guess fairly heavy) outside, only had a couple things blow over. The yellowjackets’ nest, unfortunately, wasn’t drowned.
The playground nearest our house was cleaned up very quickly; by Tuesday morning it was free of branches, there was fresh bark under all the play equipment, and even the annoying staircase that's impossible to walk on, unless there is fresh gravel between the railroad ties, had fresh gravel. And the equipment was very clean.
Around the corner from our house, however, until this morning, the street was closed. A tree had gone down, taking down some power lines, and knocking out the power. A local online paper reported that the shopping center just off that road was affected and that the supermarket was running on generator power for a while. The streets that were closed are pretty heavily used—around here there tend not to be that many streets that aren’t local-only—and traffic was being rerouted all the way to the other end of town and back. At least some of the houses in the affected area got power back yesterday. The road farther along is still closed.
In the north part of town, some people don’t expect their electricity to be back on until Saturday. I was told a tree had gone down and caught fire in the street. Schools are open, but at least one is on generator power.
The next town over, and there are very many people with no electricity. It seems to depend in part on which company supplies your power.
At the supermarket, which evidently has power now, but the frozen-food section of which—between renovations and, I guess, people restocking—is a little depleted, I saw a car with two [1] stickers on it: One read “Remember when sex was safe and motorcycles were dangerous?” Sure. Must have been back before penicillin. Curing syphilis by mercury poisoning—oh, the good old days. The other read “Scott Brown Republican.”
[1] Actually there were many, many stickers on it.
Comments