When you wake up in the morning and the first question you hear is, “What happened to the clock,” it’s not a good sign.
It had continued to snow Wednesday night, and by early Thursday morning, the top of Lavender Mountain was a winter wonderland. A quiet, dark winter wonderland. We lost power sometime during the night. We were one of many all over Rome and the surrounding area.
I measured seven inches of ice and snow on the deck railing. Everything in sight was covered by snow, including the roads. The pines were all sagging and several had simply snapped. One in our leach field had broken at the base. Fouche Gap Road was blocked going down into Texas Valley, and would have been blocked on the town side if someone had not used a chain saw to clear a downed pine.
As bad as it was, it could have been much worse. A little more snow, a little more ice, and it’s likely there would have been many more outages and a lot more trees down. According to the Atlanta TV stations, about a million people lost power, from Atlanta east towards Augusta. A fairly large number were still without power Friday afternoon.
We have a generator, so we could keep track of what was going on 70 miles away in Atlanta, but not, of course, what was happening down the road in Rome. The generator let us keep the refrigerator and freezer going. I don’t have the 220-volt well pump set up to run off the generator, so a long-term power outage would be a problem for us. Around mid-afternoon we were making plans to go to my mother’s house to fill up water containers when the power came back on. It was a pleasant surprise. There are only 10 houses on top of the mountain; that’s not a lot compared to the many neighborhoods without power all around us.
All in all, we didn’t have much to complain about. It was very beautiful while it lasted.
I walked Zeke partway down Fouche Gap into Texas Valley, far enough to see the big pine across the road. The son of one of our neighbors managed to get the left side of his four-wheel-drive into a ditch, and we weren’t sure he was going to get out. He did, but the big pine a little further down stopped him. He walked the rest of the way down the mountain to his home.
Thursday evening we drove down into town to have dinner. The roads at the bottom of the mountain were completely clear and there was almost no snow anywhere except in deep shade. It was a different world from up on top of the mountain.
By Friday morning, most of the snow was gone up here. The roads were clear, almost all the snow had melted off the trees, and the only snow on the ground was in the shade. We’re running short of firewood, but I found some more old, dead cedars and a couple of smallish, dead trees that I think are black locust. So we’re set for some more cold weather, but right now at 8 PM it’s 43 degrees and rain is falling. Our storm is over.
Here are a few pictures I took Thursday morning before the melt began. This is the view down our driveway.
This is looking towards the woods at the back of the house.
This is on Fouche Gap Road looking towards Texas Valley.
This is the pine that stopped our neighbors’ son on his way down into Texas Valley. that’s Zeke’s rear end. This is the more northerly side of the mountain, so it stayed snowier longer than the road leading down to Huffaker Road and town.
You are so lucky that the power was restored as quickly as it was. That’s such great news. As much as I dislike the consequences of big snows, I do love how beautiful it makes the land. There is nothing like that silence after a snowfall in the woods.
You got a lot more stuff on the trees than we did, which I guess explains the pine thwarting that hunky truck. Cool that you made it down the mountain Thursday night for dinner out! We canceled training – no dinner out for us.
No power loss for us, but south of I-20 the Georgia Power outage map (which is a really great resource) showed a lot of folks without power. We’re not with Georgia Power but the site was useful in planning ahead anyway.
We’ve never gotten a generator – thought about it a couple of times. But then there’s the issue of years without snow (though not in the last few), making sure it works every year, and then not using it, and then storing the fuel for it. I’ve fallen down on the job this year in getting firewood in, and making sure the chimney is clean.
Oh – and great photos. I really like the Fouche Gap Road photo, as well as the dropoff on the last photo.
Robin Andrea — We were lucky, indeed. I was afraid our little island of houses would be low on the priority list, but Georgia Power did a good job on the lines.
Wayne — It was really surprising how quickly things improved during the day. I was trying to scrape quarter-inch ice off my truck windshield in the morning and by afternoon the truck was nearly bare. I’m kicking myself about our firewood situation. I usually have wood left over after winter, but this time we may barely scrape through the coldest months with old, scrounged wood lying around the yard. I’m planning to start cutting firewood for next winter right away. I have my eye on some oaks that are a little too close to the house, and some other trees too close to the leach field.