We were right to encourage Barbara, Paloma and Simon to go down to Atlanta a day early in view of the anticipated severe winter weather. I drove down to drop them off on Monday in increasingly cold weather, and they reached their hotel for the night safely. On the way home there were a few flurries of sleet, indicative of the cold to come. And it was really cold. Overnight, the temperature dropped well below freezing, and snow started falling. We woke to a white landscape, and no prospect of getting up the drive. Meanwhile, in Atlanta, our visitors had a cold but clear day – they took advantage of the time to visit the very impressive Georgia Aquarium and got to the airport in very good time for their flight back to London on Tuesday evening.
The real problem with the weather was not the snow. We were afflicted by freezing rain – it was so cold that rain falling from above in a (relatively) warm atmosphere was increasingly chilled as it hit colder and colder air lower down. The supercooled rain froze immediately it hit the ground, or trees. The weight of ice built up was enough to break branches, even bring down trees. The local pines are notably shallow rooted, so they are the most prone to fall. And when a sixty foot pine tree falls (as very many of them did), adjacent power lines are broken too. Fate caught up with us at 11pm on Tuesday when, after a couple of warning flickers, the power went out. There was nothing to be done, no light or heat, so we went to bed to see what the morning would bring.
On Wednesday morning, the power remained off. Fortunately, we had made precautions by buying suitable supplies for a siege, ensuring plenty of torch batteries to hand, and keeping our phones and iPad fully charged. Whilst the broadband was unavailable as the router power was absent, we have a portable battery powered router using the cell service and so were able to keep a track of the state of the power outages on the utility provider’s website. At peak, there were about 10,000 homes without service.
Fortunately, we have a propane gas tank, so we could do some cooking on the gas hobs. And we were able to have a log fire in living room fireplace in the sub-freezing temperatures. All day long, there was no power, and no way to get out. However, the cars were useful – I was able to use one to charge up our electronic bits and pieces. The snow kept falling, and we accepted the inevitable, going to bed fairly early.
At about 4 am on Thursday we were awakened as light came on and the central heating spluttered into life. Power was back. It had been staggeringly cold, breaking records (-6F= -14C, plus another -10C or so for windchill at 8am). By noon, the temperature had risen to a balmy -2F, and it did continue climbing. But there was still no way to get out, even though the snow had stopped falling and was even melting in the bright sunlight. Underneath a layer of white snow was a treacherous layer of ice, harder to thaw than the snow on trees and bushes, and Lisa could only just manage to reach halfway up the driveway.
It was not until Friday afternoon that, with a determined dash up the slope, we escaped to the outside road. Once there, it seemed incredible to compare the apparently dry clear roads with our snowbound hollow. But as we drove to the supermarket to replenish stocks for the anticipated second round of snow, the amount of damage was clear. Trees down and roughly cleared off the roads everywhere. Not just ones or twos, there were large clumps of pines flattened by the weather. The road crews had obviously been out to clear the roads, but the debris was right by the tarmac – someone is going to be busy over the next few weeks. There were crews from the power company working from several car parks to replace power lines, even the poles to carry the lines. As we neared Dawsonville, fifteen miles south, the damage increased, and the trees were glistening in the winter sun from all the ice still weighting them down.