That's the Night that the Lights Went Out in Tolland

Saturday, October 29, 11:27pm.  The time 11:27 remained stuck on our old stove for 8 days and 1 hour.

It should have been the Fall Festival/Trunk or Treat at church.

Halloween should have been 2 days later.

Not so, my friends, no so.

Once the church party was cancelled, we went out to play in the snow that was already coming down.

20 minutes later, we heard cracking sounds and lost 2 big limbs in our front yard.  Immediately, we made the kids come inside.

They dressed up in their costumes and went trick or treating to different rooms in the house. 

Our power stayed on and we were feeling hopeful.  At 11:27, we lost power and then spent the night listening to cracking limbs and falling branches.  A long scary night.

We woke up to another big limb down in front and at least 20 limbs down in back from different trees.

This was our road right in front of our neighbors house on Sunday morning.

This limb was dangling in front of the house.

We pulled out the corded phone and still had phone service through most of Sunday.  Whitney didn't believe it was a real phone.

Monday we went into Matt's office since he had to work but also had heat.  I ordered a kerosene heater online from Lowes and we drove to a Lowes 45 minutes south to pick it up.  Driving back Monday afternoon, we really began witnessing the crazy gas lines and gas stations with no gas.  It was insane.

Warming up by our blessed heater.  Check out the sheets we had up blocking the upstairs.

Kids remained happy.  Actually, no one complained the entire week.  Yea for good kids!  

 Here's the living room with our heater.  A dark scene but it got us up to 66 or 67 degrees each night in the hallway so probably at least 70 degrees for the kids before we headed to bed.

Below is the room with a flash.  The kids camped in the living room all week.  Yea for good sleeping bags and multiple-layered jammies.

Glow sticks were a fun hit since it was dark every night by 6pm.

Day 5--still SO many trees like this in the roads

Yard clean-up.  Mary and Andrew were big helpers

We have a well which means when there is no power, we have no water b/c the electricity pumps the well. Toilet flushing with buckets, toothbrushing with cups, etc, etc.   This storm was a great chance to assess how far our water storage would take us.  We filled both bathtubs with water to use for flushing and then had a store of laundry detergent containers of water on top of a 55 gallon drum, 2 5-gallon drums, and a couple dozen soda and juice bottles of water.  I'd estimate we had 90 gallons of water plus the 2 bathtubs full.  After 8 days, we still had water left.

Once we used all the tub water, the tub became our container storage place.

3 crazy guys (one being Matt) got the limb off our wire with a roof rake and extention ladder.  I was grateful I saw a neighbor touching it a few days before but even still, I would have been so mad at Matt if he would have killed himself!

Day 8--our first sighting of a power truck in our town.  What an exciting moment.

 

This truck took down a huge tree that we had to drive around every single day.

And below, just a bunch more shots of the insanity--they are all from Day 8.  I don't think you can truly grasp the magnitude unless you really see it.  It is rare to see any property that doesn't have one, some, or many trees damaged.  Our street alone probably had 5 or 6 people who lost the power lines from the street to their house and most streets seemed to have at least one section of the main power line down.  The top of the power line closest to our house broke off.

Right next to the intersection before our street.

Everywhere you go, debris now lines the street

Did I really drive through this?  How?!  Crazy!

Sunday night we got home from a friends and saw a crew on the street next to ours.  Matt heard/saw them working on our broken pole at 11:30pm and we had power by 12:30.  Oh happy day.