What a week.

Last Sunday, July 26th, was exciting. A thunder storm came through at about 6:00 pm and changed everything that we had planned for the near future. Of course we lost power, which we do about 5 times a year. With the power we also lost the phone, the WWW, the TV and, not the least of our concerns, our 80' Locust tree. The wind simply blew her over.

The tree as there when the house was built in the early 1960s. While there was some dead wood on her, she was really quite majestic. Luckily for all, she fell toward the house, damaging only the fence. Had the tree fallen in any of the other directions, the situation would have been much worse for there would have been other trees involved, possible road closure and or damage to our various neighbors' property, etc. So, from that standpoint we are lucky.


As you can imagine, the utility outages were also the result of trees. The utility poles that service our small cluster of homes comes up through the woods and routinely some limb will fall on them, usually simply knocking out the fuses. This time, however, a tree, comparable to the one we lost, simply fell on one of the poles, pulled or broke all of the various wires and cables and broke the pole. A second pole was also broken. Additionally, the main electrical feeders in the area were damaged. It was a mess and BGE work hard at restoring everyone as fast as possible. Unfortunately we were among the last and it was Tuesday evening when I finally put away the generator which we ran for a few hours every eight hours during the outage.

Having cut enough of the tree to repair the fence, to keep Lily contained, I waited for estimates and insurance people to give me input. Finally, Mary and I decided to head for Delaware on Thursday, still without phone, TV or WWW. Actually the phone people arrived on Wednesday to repair our Verizon phone and DSL connections. It was at that time that they FINALLY recognized that they had a bigger problem on their hands. This, despite the fact that I had called the repair people and alerted them to the scope of the problem earlier. It seems that the fact that a dozen people on the same phone system's lines calling about similar problems at about the same time, after a large storm, didn't "trigger" some sort of wider problem identification. Likewise, it seems that despite renting space on their poles, Baltimore Gas and Electric didn't bother to tell Verizon that "oh, we lost a couple of poles with your wires and cables on them a few days ago." (You've got to love today's computer powered generation.)

Anyway, we are hoping that when we return, things will be fine. Here are a few shots of the tree: