Our week during the 2007 ice storm in Southwest Missouri

Of the 44 pictures I took of the ice on the trees and whatnot, I thought this one was the prettiest :-) They're all pretty in a weird, eerie sort of way though. You see, for us it all started to go down hill last Saturday morning at 2 a.m. That's when the power went out first. It was off for about 12 hours: came back on Sunday afternoon around, you guessed it, 2 p.m. We didn't know what our future was, but I decided to do my usual Sunday thing and watch the NFL playoffs. That was going okay. Then 5:30-ish rolled around and the electricity went off AGAIN. We figured that it wouldn't be off long since they got it back on pretty quickly the last time. Well, we were wrong! At the time though we still had water, but as it turned out that was only because the tank in the pumphouse still had water (I think, or there was still water in the lines), so we were able to flush the toilet at least. Unfortunately that didn't last. Sometime during the morning of Monday the 15th of January, the water stopped flowing. Luckily, we keep many juice bottles filled with water at any given time just for these "just in case" scenarios. Usually we just use them to fill water bowls for the animals (cats & dog's indoors and chicken's & duck's outdoors), especially on those mornings when it dips below freezing outside and turning on the outside picket wouldn't do any good, ya know? :) Anyway, we had water. Luckily for some reason the week prior I had decided on a whim that I was going to fill the one-gallon jugs as they became empty (as opposed to waiting until there were ten or more to be filled and then doing a marathon filling). Turns out that was prophetic. *smile* Then on Monday we saw that there was a limb that broke-off of the tree by an electrical wire (to an outbuilding) and was hanging on said wire, so Rain was going to call the electric company to let them know. At that point she found that there was no dial-tone. We of course checked all of the phone-jacks to make sure it wasn't a problem inside the house, even though we kind of knew there wasn't. Tuesday afternoon rolled around and we decided that one of us should go up to the neighbor's house and see if they have phone service, or if the entire neighborhood was out. I was the chosen one. Got up there and they did have service, and they let me use their phone to call the phone & electric company. The phone person told me that they'd be out within 24 hours to check the phone. Wednesday afternoon rolled around and STILL no phone service, so we figured we'd just call them on Friday when we went to the store to get some more food, so I did. The phone person told me that they were just extremely busy and would be out as soon as possible, hopefully "within 24 hours". That wasn't so bad since the electricity had came back on Wednesday evening around 6:30 p.m. That was cool because we had missed the start of American Idol on Tuesday and there was to be the 2nd 2-hour show Wednesday night at 7 p.m. CST. *smile* Anyway, the phone service *finally* got turned back on Saturday morning and has been on ever since... so far. So anyway, as I said, the electricity came on Wednesday evening, so of course we were THRILLED! Waited a little bit to let the water pressure build back up in the pumphouse tank and tried the faucets - no water. Figured we'd just have to reset the pump and everything would be back to relative normalcy - WRONG! Opened the door to the pumphouse to check and heard running water :-( Looked at the filter housing and saw that it had frozen and broke-off at some point, but the water wasn't coming from there. I was standing in 6 inches of water at this point, looked down, and saw that there was water GUSHING out of the pipe coming out of the ground. Oh no! Freak-out time, BIG TIME! I ran as fast as I could to the shed, thinking that perhaps there was left-over pipe that I could use to "mend" the broken one, but didn't find any. Ran back to the pumphouse to try just putting it back together. LOL. Of course THAT didn't work, too much pressure. *sigh* Was still freaking, ran into the house to tell my wife. She didn't know what to do either, so I grabbed the duct tape and headed back out. I was out there in a foot of water now (with holey boots), wrapping the tape as fast as I could around the pipe, freezing my ass, feet, and hands off when my wife showed-up and suggested looking for an "off" switch. Of course I had NO CLUE where it would be. She looked around and saw a couple of breaker boxes and one of them had "emergency switch" (or similar) written on it so I pulled that down and VOILA, the water shut off because that switch turned off the underground pump. WHEW! But now we have no water and all of our water bottles are empty (except maybe one or two). We collected some ice sickles from outside and melted them in a pan so we had water to at least flush the toilet one time (and boy did it need it. lol). Thursday morning came and we drove into town to get some PVC pipe and see if we could find another filter housing unit. Got the pipe, but no one had the housing. Went into town on Friday to do a little grocery shopping and stopped by Sears - they had the whole unit for $40 (couldn't get *just* the housing, but what're ya gunna do). Brought that home, put it on, and it STILL leaked out the top of the housing. *sigh* So what did I do? I tightened it as tight as I could, of course. Unfortunately that wasn't tight enough because it STILL squirted water at the breaker boxes (yes, I turned the water of quick to keep from blowing the fuses with water). That wasn't enough bad luck though, because as it turns out I must've cross-threaded the filter housing and could NOT get it off :-( Now what?! Took the WHOLE unit off, took it in the house where it was warm, to work on it, but it's too tight. *sigh* I guess I don't know my own strength sometimes. Luckily though, we had gotten the whole unit at Sears, which had a 'bypass' setting, so we set it on that so the housing didn't *have* to be on it, yet we could still get water. Which was awesome, because I didn't/don't have the pipe-fittings to create a short pipe to go where the filter unit is. But now we have no filter. Oh well. Maybe if we can get the housing off at some point, we'll put it on, but for now it's not totally necessary. *shew!* So you're probably wondering what we did between Sunday evening and Wednesday evening to take off the time without a computer or television, huh? I finished the 2nd half of "Cell", by Stephen King, and have started on another book by Neale Donald Walsch named "What God Wants". Besides reading, we played several games of checkers (11 yo son kicked butt), a few of chess, one of The Game of Life, listened to the radio until the batteries died, talked, started fires in the woodstove which luckily still heats the house even without the fan, albeit somewhat slower. We (as in my wife) used the propane camping cookstove to cook with. Luckily we had bought several extra little tanks of propane for it a while back, although we only needed one more than the one that had been on it. What we learned through those 4 days without electricity was that we don't have enough crafty things to do, need even more juice bottle to fill with water in case power goes out for longer than 5 days, need more food that doesn't have to be cooked, and an "eco-fan" for the woodstove would be a plus. That's a fan that sits on the top of the stove that comes on as the heat from the stove rises. That's about how our week went. Hope yours, if you were in a similar situation, turns out well too. We expect that with all the broken wires, limbs on wires, that the power will probably be off & on for a while until all the damage & debris can be dealt with. We're just SO HAPPY that we have electricity, water, heat (and firewood once we cut-up all the fallen limbs), food, and friends that worried about us. Thank you guys and gals, you must know that we love you all dearly! *SUPER HUGE HUGS*

P.S. In case you're wondering why we didn't go and check on the neighbors until we needed a phone, that's because we knew they had a generator (could hear it), so figured they were fine, which they were :-)

Technorati : bottles, cell, eco-fan, family, filter housing, friends, ice, icestorm, juice jugs, life, long lane, meeks, mfa, missouri, neale donald walsch, sears, southwest, springfield, stephen king, survival, wells, what gog wants
Ice Rocket : bottles, cell, eco-fan, family, filter housing, friends, ice, icestorm, juice jugs, life, long lane, meeks, mfa, missouri, neale donald walsch, sears, southwest, springfield, stephen king, survival, wells, what gog wants