Power is back on!

It was a nice surprise to come home this evening and find the electricity was back on. Central Kansas got nailed by a nasty ice storm over the weekend and many folks were in the dark. Our power blinked off early Sunday morning and came back on sometime this evening when we were in town having supper. We have a small generator that can keep the fridge and freezer cold, blower on the wood stove running, and a few lights on so it wasn't too bad. It does make a person realize what we take for granted, though. The ice never built up too bad on the ground but it sure stuck to trees, fences, and power lines. All together we got about two inches of rain. There will be lots of branches to pick up when it finally dries off.

Here's a picture I took yesterday of the ice on our goat fence.

Glad you got your power back. Even with a generator it is a pain not having it.

The conditions and circumstances you describe make up exactly why I would not be without a wood stove in the house...sounds like you are well prepared for this kind of trouble.

We are still cleaning up from the ice storm we had in february. I hope you dont have the damage we did. The labor estimate for the cleanup on my place was in excess of $40,000. Thats the cleanup not the damage. Every spare minute I have had since then has been cleaning up the mess. Thats why I havent posted a lot in that time. FEMA said it looked like an F2 tornado over a large area. The USDA guy that came out said I had the worst damage he had seen. He told me he didnt know how I was able to get up and face it every morning. I told him I just thanked God we had a place for it to happen to. Insurance didnt cover it since it was mainly fences , fields and trees. Hopefully USDA or FEMA is going to help pay for 2/3 or so of the cleanup. I hope so! I had made it totally out of debt a couple of years ago but this has got me back in a little. Sorry I didnt mean to hijack the thread. I hope you have good luck with your cleanup.

(quoted from post at 20:16:47 11/30/15) The conditions and circumstances you describe make up exactly why I would not be without a wood stove in the house...sounds like you are well prepared for this kind of trouble.

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Same here. I told my wife when we first moved out here that we need a wood heater because the power goes off and we are one of the last to get it back on. It has saved us quite a few times when the weather turned to ice. Today it hit a record of 80 F here in central Alabama. It is just too dang warm to go deer hunting. Ugh.

I knew that Oklahoma had an ice storm but I didn't realize that it went up in to central Kansas..

(quoted from post at 20:26:43 11/30/15) We are still cleaning up from the ice storm we had in february. I hope you dont have the damage we did. The labor estimate for the cleanup on my place was in excess of $40,000. Thats the cleanup not the damage. Every spare minute I have had since then has been cleaning up the mess. Thats why I havent posted a lot in that time. FEMA said it looked like an F2 tornado over a large area. The USDA guy that came out said I had the worst damage he had seen. He told me he didnt know how I was able to get up and face it every morning. I told him I just thanked God we had a place for it to happen to. Insurance didnt cover it since it was mainly fences , fields and trees. Hopefully USDA or FEMA is going to help pay for 2/3 or so of the cleanup. I hope so! I had made it totally out of debt a couple of years ago but this has got me back in a little. Sorry I didnt mean to hijack the thread. I hope you have good luck with your cleanup.

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I know how you feel on this. I got hit by an EF4 tornado head on and it just destroyed my 70 odd acres. I finally got tired of struggling with the old Ford 8N and got a new Kubota 4x4 with an FEL and relegated the N to grass cutting duty. FEMA would not help me at all. Guess I was the wrong species and actually had insurance on my home. I had a new Metal Roofing back on in less than a week. It still does not pay enough to put back like it was, that was on me. The corp of engineers did advertise to sign up at the court house for help with clean up. Sure enough I got a call a couple of days later and then they came out and cleaned up all the "Improved areas"... around the house and trees that had fell around the fields. Took them all day and they had four guys with chainsaws and a very large truck that had a grapple. That thing could grab a large oak tree stump and work it back and forth and just snatch it out. I was very impressed. They could not do anything with the other 60 acres...lol. Kubota does an excellent job for that though. There just isn't anything like getting hit by a real tornado in the dark and coming too (knocked around and stunned) with water pouring in everywhere and trees inside with you and windows blown out and wife has a broken leg. I think I finally figured out the verse in the bible that says, "The rain falls on the just and the unjust". Got that one Lord, don't need to do that again, please. I still have a big tangled mess on the back 40 and an just too scared to go down the hill back there where the creek bottom is at. Too steep for me.
You might want to check into the corp of engineers to see if they will help.

Wow, that sounds like it was a doozy - what you describe is a lot worse than what I've seen around here.

Most of the damage in this area was to elm trees and around our place it is mostly three inch and under sized branches. We've had several major ice storms in the last ten years where bigger stuff came down - 8 to 10 inch - so maybe all the weakened big limbs have been pruned out already. The field perimeter clean-up will be hampered by the large amount of water standing around. Can't get around the fields when it's muddy and after it freezes the limbs will be stuck to the ground.

Ice storm isn't anything to sneeze at! I've been through two major ice storms way down here and each time the power was off at least seven days. Major inconvenience for sure. No water for 10 days. I had to get up at 4:30 AM and drive down to our pond and break ice to fill up about five 5 gallon buckets and take back to the house for the wife and our two little kids (grown now) to be able to pour into the toilet for flushing. I brought drinking water home with me. I then had to go to the barn and feed the hay burners and then head out to work. Repeat and rinse in the evening when I got home...lol. I would drive slow and easy, all the idiots that thought they could drive as usual were off in the ditches. Fun times in Alabama...lol. We usually have a secondary storm season in December with tornadoes as we have the warm air colliding with the cold air that comes down from the north and creates them. Quite a few people have been killed in December from those things, they are quite serious here. Here is the one from my birthday on April 27th 2011. Bad stuff for many states as over 300 people died that day and the next combined. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Super_Outbreak

Here is a taste of December storms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Super_Outbreak

I still remember this one well on Christmas day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_25–28,_2012_North_American_storm_complex

Ice is no fun. Back in 2007 we had that problem and no power for a week. Was not a fun time but got by with what we had on hand. Heated the house sort of with a propane camper heater and well got by but that was it

I didn't ever lose power North of you Brendon but I expected it at any minute. I had the generator ready to go, but like you say it is better than nothing at best. Glad you are back in business. Bob

I was stationed at Ft Riley 3 different times. I hated the ice storms there! Last bad one I was there for was the day before Thanksgiving in 93. A soldier who was boarding horses at the post stable was killed when he drove down to check his horses Thanksgiving day. Large cottonwood branch broke under the weight of the ice and fell on his car killing him. Those storms were nasty business. Glad to hear you got power back.

Rick

1998 Northeast Ice storm up to 3 inches of ice in upstate NY. Complete power grid destroyed. Our oldest
boy and DIL were living in the worst hit areas at that time. You couldn't even drive the roads to get
someone out.
Great northeast ice storm 1998

Glad everyone is OK ! I know being raised on a farm that you better have a generator that is big enough! I have three that will run my house no sweat and I can even loan one out. We depend on electricity so much today it is crazy. I have a collection of kerosene lamps and like their charm. Will always have light and can go from there. Run them on synthetic kerosene. No smell and make a very nice paper white color. A lot of neighbors have finally bought generators around here and some people are getting solar panels! I don't have the correct sun and building position for solar.

You have to be careful on some of the solar installations, they must see other voltage source present to sync and connect, they do this to prevent back feeding in power outage. I would think a small generator would excite it enough to connect to your home.