As residents of this area who have witnessed a fair amount of winters know, when snow accumulates (even lots of it), life in general is pretty manageable.
But ice? That’s a different story.
This week, many Texas County folks endured difficult, confounding and sometimes perilous situations because of the latest “ice storm” to hit the area. As a reminder, ice builds up on stuff due to “freezing rain,” which is precipitation that falls in liquid form but due to the temperature of the air mass at ground level, freezes after coming in contact with certain surfaces. And of course, those surfaces are often the kind you don’t want ice building up on, like tree branches, power lines and roadways.
Here’s a description of the challenges my wife Wendy and I faced during the aftermath of this area’s latest ice storm. I have a feeling some of this will sound sort of familiar to some of you.
On Sunday, with the rain falling hard and ice coating pretty much everything in sight, we had noticed the electricity in our house blinking on and off a time or two. We also found that a tall, skinny pine tree on our property had bent way over due to the weight of the ice and was leaning on a power line that goes from the main line to the well house on the property.
But as we turned in for the night, the house was warm and everything was still OK.
Not long before 2 a.m., I woke up and was about to turn over (as many of us are prone to doing multiple times per night) and something caught my attention: It was quiet. I rather quickly became aware that the fan that is normally blowing lightly in the bedroom wasn’t operating.
I reached over to turn on the light on the nightstand, and there was no light. I knew then that the electricity had gone out.
“Oh, great,” I thought.
After gathering my wits and coming to grips with the reality of the moment, I got up, grabbed a flashlight and went to the living room to stoke the wood fire and set up the couch as a sleeping space, so I could maintain the fire and keep the powerless house as warm as possible. I alerted Wendy to the situation, and she said we should call Intercounty Electric Cooperative and report our outage.
I agreed, because they always encourage people to call in an outage rather than assume someone else has. But I didn’t expect that we would be speaking to a human being at 2 a.m., but that’s exactly what happened. A kind, courteous woman took our information and (of course) advised us that there was no time frame for the restoration of our power.
Considering the circumstances, I felt a bit scared about the prospects of the hardship we might be facing if our electricity stayed absent for days or the tree took the well house power line down.
With the fire burning strong, I laid down on the couch and went to sleep.
A while later, I was startled and awakened by that beeping sound the oven makes when the electricity comes back. I looked at my phone and saw the time was 5:50 a.m.
I said out loud, “thank you Lord,” and I went back to bed, knowing the furnace would once again spread warm air around the house.
A couple of hours later, I got myself ready to go, let the truck warm up a bit, and headed out for the day. When I reached the end of our long gravel driveway, I was thankful that the tree leaning on the power line seemed to be in about the same position as the night before.
But as I rounded the corner on the roadway leading out of our secluded neighborhood, I saw that a tree downed by the weight of a thick coating of ice was almost entirely blocking the way. Fortunately, there was just enough room to the left of the top of the tree to squeeze the truck through the bushes and get around the obstruction.
When I reached the Herald office, I called a Piney Township official and reported the blockage, and I was informed that a crew would soon be on scene to cut up the tree and clear the road.
Since we had forgotten to bring up the well house power line situation when speaking to the Intercounty woman in the middle of the night, Wendy called again and reported it.
When I came home in the early afternoon, there was no tree over the road and no tree leaning on the power line.
I felt an overwhelming sense of relief and was like, “wow, that’s some quick service!”
Honestly, I want to thank the Piney Township and Intercounty crews that tended to our predicaments and turned what could have been a couple of pretty ugly situations into nothing but memories. I can only imagine how many similar calls were fielded during the icy outbreak, and I thoroughly appreciate the rapid responses.
Doug Davison is a writer, photographer and newsroom assistant for the Houston Herald. Email: ddavison@houstonherald.com.