Thursday, October 27, 2011

Snowstorms in fall=not good

That was an insane few days.

Ice and heavy wet snowstorm before the trees had dropped their leaves wreaked havoc in our city. At our house, an enormous branch fell off our giant cottonwood tree--12 inches or more across at the break, 50 feet up, covered a fourth of our yard, and the "Fringes" of it landed on Daniel with all the heavy snow that pulled it down. Somehow, it knocked him over but didn't hurt him. I, of course, freaked out because it could have killed him, and when all I could see was falling snow, coming down right on top of my son, after hearing the crack of the branch breaking....well, let's just say it was like living in one of my worst nightmares.

A few hours later, the power went out, and it was still snowing. Within 10 minutes, Tim left for Utah for a tour, so it was me and 6 kids with no car, no phone, and no electricity. By 3:00 yesterday afternoon, there was still no power, and it was getting cold in the house, so we prayed for the power to come on quickly and for us to be warm enough until it did. Five minutes later, a friend from the ward knocked on the door and said she'd come to take us to her house for the night. Phew. Rarely is a prayer answered so quickly and so dramatically.

Apparently the storm broke trees all over the city, knocked out power to 1200+ people, and they could only restore power en masse to 500 of those. The other 700 were in groups of 1-20 houses with no power, and they had to deal with each of those outages one at a time. The estimate for our house was 3 days, so it was another miracle that we got back into our house before 48 hours were up.

So we spent the night at our friends' and managed to get the kids to school, even, and sometime in the middle of the day, the power came back on at our house (but went off at another friend's house).

So we're back at home. And, by a series of several miracles, none the worse for the wear. Also very grateful and very determined to get emergency candles and a prepaid cellphone for emergencies like that. (We have a 911 cell phone for emergencies, but we need a "call a friend" and "call the power company" cell phone for emergencies, too--one of those $15 ones would work fine).

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