My house is all electric so we made it thru the initial night of the storm by piling all the blankets we had in one room after the power went out. The power was out for about a full week. They had to bring in crews from all over the country to try and get power restored. The power lines around my neighborhood were flattened by falling tree limbs. It was eerie listening to these huge tree limbs crack and pop then fall during the night. We went to a hotel after the first night and a friend of my ex-wife kept our dog since we couldn't keep her at the hotel. When we woke up after the first night, the temperature inside the house was just below 50 degrees so we weren't going to stay another night there. It's such a rare occurrence where I live that not a lot of people have generators so life came to a halt pretty quickly. It was very cold over the course of the next few days but the hotel room was nice and warm...lol
What was really irritating was that my parents live about a mile from me down the hill and their power was restored within a few hours. They live right along the main highway so I guess that made it easier to restore, and I didn't realize the extent of the damage to the power lines and poles until I took a drive around our block a couple of days later. The lines were all laying on the ground for the most part, some of the transformers had been hit by huge tree limbs and were knocked off the pole or just barely hanging on by a wire or two. I'd never seen anything like it in my life. I was surprised as close as we live to Fayetteville that it took that long to get our power restored. We had to get rid of all our groceries and all the food out in our extra freezer in the laundry room a couple of days later. We lived out of the hotel room and did laundry at the hotel. I don't think I was ever as happy to return home, it was a mess. I do remember the Governor calling out the National Guard to help people out but I never saw them in my neck of the woods. I have some pictures somewhere of what our yard looked like after it was all over with. There were so many tree limbs down that we couldn't get across our street or out of our driveway until I did some serious chainsaw cutting.
The only cool thing about the whole mess? I called into work the morning after the storm at the police department because there was so much damage to my yard and I physically couldn't get out of my driveway. I called my Sergeant at around 7:30am that morning to let him know what was going on. By around noon, about half of the guys that I worked with had taken personal time off, and arrived at my house carpooling with the guys who drove 4 x 4 pickups. They arrived with chainsaws and lunch. I was blown away. We spent the afternoon cutting limbs off my house, off my fence, and helped out my neighbors on both sides do the same. What would have taken me a week to do, took us an afternoon. I was blown away, as I always seemed to be, by their generosity. No one would take any money for helping me out, no one wanted any sappy thank yous. When the job was done, my sergeant told me to take a couple of days to get my family situated and to call him if we needed any help getting anything else done. It was a very touching and appreciated show of teamwork from all of them, and I've never forgotten it. Of course, I had to put up with everyone complaining when I got back to work that they were sore and that I'd made them spend their personal time off doing lumberjack work, or that I was just too much of a wimp to do it all on my own, but I took every ribbing in stride because the gesture was appreciated more than I could explain to them.
