Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Ice Storm

If you live in New England, you are surely aware of the gigantic ice storm that affected the area on Friday, December 12. There have been massive, widespread power outages in MA and NH, over 300,000 customers in each state, with more in Vermont and Maine. In Boxborough, our power was out for the better part of three days. We were fortunate that our friends Adam and Christi, who live in Acton (one town over) never lost any services, and they were very gracious in offering us their spare bedroom, since we had no light, heat or water. We actually had a great time all weekend!

We were fortunate not to have much damage (trees or otherwise) around our house. One chunk of one of the pine trees came down on the edge of the yard. We moved some stuff out of the fridge into A+C's fridge, and moved the rest into a container outside, since the high was about 30 on Saturday and 40 on Sunday. To guard against frozen pipes, we chose to drain the boilers on Saturday afternoon, as the temp in the house got down to about 40 during the day, and it was supposed to be 15 overnight. Not sure if this was overkill or not, but we didn't know when the power would be coming back on, and the temp on Sunday morning was 34 inside the woman-cave!

The attached pictures pale in comparison to others I have seen from further west and north, but there they are for documentation purposes. In addition to the ice, we also got a lot of rain, as you can see from the high water level in the pond behind our house. You can sort of make out the old beaver dam -- this is normally a dropoff of about 18 inches.

On the other side of Boxborough (to the west), the town of Harvard *still* has power out as of this morning. I guess it could have been worse!



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