We [don't] like Ike!

[Kathleen Helms]

The Hurricane, that is

On Sunday, September 14, at 2:00 p.m. hurricane Ike whipped through the Ohio Valley and left some 2.5 million people without power.

One hundred seventy hours and seven minutes later (that is, Sunday, September 21 at 4:07 p.m.) our power finally was restored. As I write these words, there are still a hundred thousand or so people around the state without power, and some of them may be that way for most of the upcoming week.

Because we run our own servers, all of our websites — including not only sites and blogs under the naebunny umbrella and Mystic-Tarot, but those we run for other folks like Dulahan, CinnaNuts, CC Quilting and a few others — were down as well. (Luckily, when our electricity came back up, our Internet did too. Dad’s house got power back at 11:30 last night, but they still don’t have the Internet back.)

We lost everything in two refrigerators and a chest freezer. Laundry is at critical mass and the house is a disaster after going this long without sweeping, etc. The water softener was of course down for 170 hours also and we have seriously hard water. Just during the course of the week, I’ve got rust stains building up on all the porcelain.

A plus — even if it was rusty and sulfur-smelling, we still had hot water throughout (yay for gas hot water heaters!) and we have lots of windows in our house, so we could stay relatively comfortable heat-wise. There were a couple days when it was just unbearable but for the most part it was almost pleasant.

We’ve got several trees in various stages of breakage and/or down, that we have to get taken care of. At the moment, we’re concentrating first on trying to get everything back up and running, so the trees and outside work can wait till tomorrow or Tuesday. Thankfully we lost no roof shingles or windows or anything like that — there are a lot of people who weren’t nearly so fortunate. I know a couple people who suffered total losses and their houses are going to have to be rebuilt. A couple of downed trees and a bunch of debris is not even comparable! I’ve also heard of at least four deaths here in the Miami Valley. I’ll take downed trees any day of the week, thankyouverymuch.

More for the plus side, we are all safe; everyone else in the family who lost power (Maggie & Joel, Cindy & Crystal, Dad, Ben & Alvin, Joel’s parents, Tim’s parents — the only ones who never lost it were David and his family) have gotten their power back as well. We were the last ones to get it! Just for the fun of it, I kept track –

* Tim’s Parents lost it last & got it back first. They went about 30 hours without power.
* Cindy got hers back next — 76 hours.
* Joel’s parents got theirs back after 146 hours.
* Maggie & Joel’s was down 149.5 hours.
* Dad’s was out 153.5 hours.
* Ours was kerplooie for 170 hours.

After our personal cleanup and restoration efforts, we’ll begin wading through redtape to get everything reimbursed through our homeowner’s insurance. Hopefully they’ll also pay for a couple of these trees that we’re not going to be able to bring down with a chainsaw ourselves. Governor Strickland declared a state of emergency and pronounced Ohio a disaster area, but we don’t know if the feds will or not. Apparently if they do, then FEMA will be paying part of it. I don’t care who pays, I just want to get back what we lost — and that’s part of what I pay homeowner’s insurance for, so they need to get busy here.

Happy Birthday to me — I got my power back!