Dear Ferret Folks-

Greetings from the Federally Designated Disaster Area of Massachusetts!
So good to know that they are thinking of us in Washington DC. Most of
you probably don't know this, but last Thursday night Massachusetts and
New Hampshire were hit with the most destructive ice storm that anybody
here has ever seen in living memory. New Hampshire has also been
declared a disaster area, and it is odd, seeing the National Guard
trucks and equipment driving around pulling huge generators on
trailers, and water trucks. As of early Friday morning, there were
only *five* cities in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that still had
power. Boston was one of them. They did very well, as most of their
power lines are under ground.

Here in northern central Mass, five days after the storm we still
have no power. I can write to you because we have a gasoline powered
generator, and the internet came back on line this morning. We heat
with wood, so we didn't lose any pipes. We are dipping into our well
for drinking water. We fill buckets of water from the stream in the
front yard for toilet flushing water. (It comes right out of our swamp,
and while perfectly clean has a heavy taste from bog iron.) We have a
cooler on the back porch that serves as a fridge. All in all, I can't
complain. We didn't suffer anything more than downed trees and limbs. I
have neighbours with shattered car windows, one with a tree that poked
a hole through the roof and into the house. Our most elderly neighbour
needs to breathe with an oxygen tank, and he has had to move out until
things normalize. Many folks have moved temporarily to the homes of
friends or relatives that have a better situation than their own. We
took in my sister, hus band, and nephew Alexander for a while until a
generator became available for their house. They have no power yet,
either.

We had two very quiet days right after the storm, days spent sawing and
dragging shattered trees out of the road so my little neighbourhood cul
de sac had access to a secondary road. It took a day to get the worst
of the trees out of the highway, Route 2, so that it was drivable. We
did most of the heavy work in our neighbourhood, and after a time the
town trucks put on their snow plows and simply shoved the downed lumber
to the sides of the road. A town crew also came by and trimmed the
hanging trees back out of the road so that you didn't have to keep
swapping lanes to drive around obstacles, like birches that had bent
double, landed in the street, and frozen there, blocking the lane. We
are still driving over downed power cables and phone wires in my
neighbourhood. You get used to it.

The night of the storm was...unforgettable. I had never heard trees
explode from sheer vertical load stress before. It's a ripping,
crunching sound followed a few seconds later by BOOM! And falling limbs
and trees start a domino effect, and knock down the stuff they landed
on, taking the whole mess right down to the ground. My little five year
old nephew, Alex, damn near lost his mind from fright when he heard
terrible noises in the night. He looked out his bedroom window and saw
the line of hundred and fifty year old maples in front of the house
disintegrate. All the little kids were terrified. Hell, us grown ups
were terrified, hearing the smashing and crashing and crunching and
BOOM!ing all night long. Trees and branches were still coming down the
next day, and we were all as jumpy as cats. You'd hear a tree start to
go, and we live surrounded by woods. It was like "*HIT! Where is it?
Is it gonna land on me?" I kid you not, it was a real fear, and a well
grounded one.

Most of the bigger towns like Leominster, Fitchburg, and Gardner are
almost fully powered. It's being done on a triage basis, so little out
of the way places like mine are just going to have to wait. That's OK,
we're on top of things, and we are patient. We can see daily progress.
I remember when the only gas station in the area with a generator had
gas lines an hour long. They are all open, now. ATM networks are up
again, it was cash only for a while. All the supermarkets are open
now, and fresh produce is coming in. For a while only the Stop&Shop
in Gardner was open with a generator, and they sold completely out of
drinking water, batteries, candles, canned stuff like Beefaroni and
fresh produce. Everybody around here was grilling dinner outside. We
did, right on the back deck. Last night I cooked on the wood stove in
my big cast iron frying pan.

Very few people were actually harmed by the storm. There was a lot of
collateral damage, like that done to elderly shut-ins and the frail,
or disabled. A few have died by completely ignoring the warning labels
on the gas-powered generators that clearly say NOT to operate them
indoors. (People lined up every morning for many hours-long waits at
Lowes and Home Depot for the generators to come on tractor trailer
trucks.) There have been carbon monoxide deaths related to that. The
clean-up, though, is horrendous and on-going. If you have ever seen
fresh hurricane damage to trees, though, that's just what it looks
like, now that the ice has thawed. It looks as if a bomb went off a
tree-top level.

I have seen electrical crews from municipalities as far away as
Wisconsin. We are very, very grateful to the people who have come to
help us rebuild our shattered infrastructure. This sounds so goofy and
fake and self-serving, but something like this really does make you
stop and think about how fortunate you are. I never lost clean water,
medical care. The Fire Department would have come in an emergency.
It's not like Zaire in southern Africa, where cholera is raging out of
control because a corrupt government has allowed inflation to rise to
the MILLIONS of percents and the infrastructure is just...gone, gone.
Other countries are trying to hold back the refugees at gunpoint, and
revolution is imminent. I just didn't have coffee for two days, and I
read by lantern light in the evening. We are very, very fortunate
people. Never forget that.

If you are a weather nut, here are some interesting URLs.

This is Baldwinville, part of my town. (Templeton is comprised of
Templeton, East Templeton, Baldwinville, and Otter River.)

<http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1308710/massachusetts_ice_storm_day_five_without.html?cat=8>

These slideshow pics are taken in all sorts of places. They don't show
the most amazing phenomenon which I saw, in Princeton, near my Sister's
house. The wind blew up a long hill, and the icicles on some of her
power lines were formed *upside-down*. They don't point straight up,
they point to about ten o'clock or two o'clock, depending upon your
perspective.

http://wbztv.com/slideshows/Ice.storm.state.20.885729.html

If you would like to read the article that I wrote about it was like in
more depth, just e-mail me and ask for the ice storm article and I will
send it to you.

Alexandra in MA

[Posted in FML 6186]