I’m a little late posting this. We got our power back around 5:30 pm Monday, almost exactly four and a half days after we lost it. We were among the last to get power restored, not only in our area, but in the entire state.
We used about three gallons of purified water from the grocery store and probably three five-gallon buckets of less pure water every day that the power was out. We lost almost everything we had in our freezer. Since I couldn’t connect the refrigerator to our generator, it didn’t occur to me right away that I could connect the freezer.
I suppose it’s good that we don’t keep much in the freezer.
Just a note: ice cream is not good after it has been thawed for a few days and then refrozen.
It was quite a relief when the power came on. It was nice to have lights actually come on when I flipped a light switch. It was especially nice to have water come out of the faucet when I turned the handle. I was happy to take a hot shower that night.
This has made it clear that we need to be better prepared for the next power outage. The biggest problem was, of course, no water, since we’re on a well. My plan is to have an electrician wire a circuit breaker lockout and a fixture where we can plug in a generator. Without a big generator we will be able to power only part of the house, but that will be OK. If we can power the refrigerator and freezer, a few light circuits, and some outlets in the living room, we will be fine. Oh, and, of course, the well pump.
Tropical Storm Zeta dropped by here early Thursday morning. It was not a good visitor. It didn’t stay long, and it tore the place up.
We woke up around 3 am to wind and rain. Leah got up around 5:30 and went into the kitchen. I heard her say, “Oh, great!” That’s when the power went off.
Zeta was predicted to bring pretty strong winds, and it did. Rome reported a peak gust of 55 mph. That was bad enough, but we had had about three inches of rain the day before, and along with the rain Zeta brought, it was enough to make the ground soggy and soft. Especially soft. Soft enough that trees fell all over North Georgia. Falling trees means, among other things, fallen power lines. Georgia Power said the storm damage was the worst in about 60 years. I checked the Georgia Power outage map for our area. It was busy.
Each icon indicates a power outage in a given area. The icon just left of center, with 15 in it, is our area. Clicking on the icon brings up information on how many customers were without power. Our little mountaintop community showed 12 customers, which means every single one of us. The numbers in the icons don’t show the number of customers without power. Other icons closer to town represented up into the hundreds of customers. The total in the Georgia Power service area was around a million.
The worst power outage we have had in our 15 years up here is less than a day. Georgia Power’s estimate for restoring power is 11 pm Sunday. For us, a very long power outage is more than an inconvenience. We have a decent generator, which means we can string extension cords through the house and get some lights, the TV, and the freezer running. Unfortunately, our refrigerator is a press fit into the cabinets, so we can’t get to the power cord for it. So now we have lights and TV, but since we are on a well, we have no water. That’s a problem. So I decided to drive down to town to get some water. That’s when we ran into the next problem. Downed trees blocked Fouche Gap Road down to Huffaker Road, which is the way we get into town.
I walked the dogs down to check it out. There was a second blockage a little further down.
The dogs and I edged past the trees, which were hanging on power lines, something I wouldn’t have done if the power lines were live. Further down the road we ran into more downed trees, but also a county road crew that was clearing the road.
Unfortunately for us, they wouldn’t touch trees that fell on power lines.
All the broken pines smelled like a Christmas tree farm.
There is a detour that leads down the far side of the mountain into Texas Valley, west along the northern edge of the mountain, and then to Huffaker a few miles further out. That adds at least 10 miles to our trip. Unfortunately (a lot of things were unfortunate), Big Texas Valley Road was blocked by trees. There is another way out of the valley that leads to Rome’s major north-south highway, US 27. The road narrows to one lane for some distance. It also had downed power lines, but they were dangling so that we could thread our way through. We got into town, but that detour is more than 20 miles, because it ends up on the wrong end of town for us.
Friday morning I saw our neighbor John, who has a grading company. He met a friend and they cut a narrow tunnel through the first downed tree on Fouche Gap. They expected to clear both places. On Friday Leah and I decided to drive into town, so we headed down Fouche Gap to Huffaker, expecting to find both blockages cleared. The second downed tree was not cleared. I said S*%T, and not for the last time. So we turned around and decided to take a chance on the 10-mile detour instead of the 20-mile detour. It was passable, but only because residents had taken their own chainsaws to the trees and cleared just enough to get by.
We stocked up on gallon jugs of filtered water for drinking and washing (hands and dishes, not entire bodies). We have a little wet-weather spring next to our driveway that provided water for toilet flushing. By Saturday it was running fairly low. Just about the time I was finding that out a neighbor came by and said we could get water at his house. He has a generator big enough to power his well pump and most of his house. I took him up on that offer, so as of late Saturday we have almost six gallons of drinking water and five five-gallon buckets filled with toilet-flushing water.
Another neighbor got a generator that automatically shuts off the company power lead and sends power into the house. Her generator is big enough to power everything in her house. That would be nice, but that kind of setup starts at around $4000 just for a smallish generator without installation. It’s hard to justify spending that kind of money for something that happens so infrequently. On the other hand, another neighbor and her husband use EPAP machines, so they have to have power. They ended up at a hotel.
Saturday morning a power company crew cleared the two trees that were blocking out way off the town side of the mountain. That allowed me to get to a fast food place and back in a reasonable time.
So, as of now, we have some water. We have some lights. It’s going to get cool tonight and cold tomorrow night. If the power company is right, we ought to have heat in time for the coldest part of the night. And how shower. That will be nice.
It’s fall here. The trees are just starting to turn, but last week, something other than a tree rushed to show its color.
This is a Virginia creeper. It’s a common vine on the mountain. In fact, it’s a common vine in about half of North America. Its range covers the entire eastern seaboard, as far west as Colorado, as far south as Texas (at least), and all the eastern Canadian provinces.
One of the most notable features of the Virginia creeper is that it is among the first plants to show fall color. I was driving down Fouche Gap Road last week and saw this brilliant red streak running up the side of a tree. When I took the dogs for a walk down that way, I took this photo. The red had faded by the time I took it, and the vine was bare about a week later.
Another vine is also showing some color.
Poison ivy. Not all that pretty. I have seen some poison ivy turning red as well.
The maples and sweetgums are beginning to turn, but the oaks haven’t really started yet.
Another sign of fall is dead deer dumped on the side of the road. I noticed a plastic garbage bag lying beside the road a couple of weeks ago. I thought it had fallen from the back of a pickup truck on its way to the county garbage transfer station; that happens sometimes. But when I nudged it with my shoe, I realized it was too heavy for garbage. I figured it was almost certainly something dead. I did not investigate further because I didn’t really want to know. I hope it’s only a deer.
The plastic protected whatever it was for longer than I expected, but by Wednesday, the sharp senses of the vultures had led them to it. They had torn the bag open, and the smell was not pleasant.
Zoe went crazy when she saw the vultures. In her opinion, they were not supposed to be there. The birds flew up into the trees. They are hard to see in this shot.
Here is a closer view of the birds.
They waited till we passed, then returned to their business. I was hoping they would find whatever is in the bag, because that’s the only way it was going to be cleaned up.
This story, like so many of my stories, starts with taking the dogs for their regular morning walk. We walked down the driveway and then along the front of our property on Lavender Trail. The first thing we noticed when we reached the intersection with Fouche Gap Road was a set of three highway hazard triangles blocking access down into Texas Valley. We proceeded, wondering what we would find. Or, at least I wondered. The dogs probably not so much.
What we found was a tour bus that didn’t quite make it around the first hairpin curve down on that side of the mountain. This is what it looked like when we came back up. I think the driver kept his lunch in the compartment that’s open.
I asked the driver whether he was following a GPS. He said yes. If you happen to come from the south side of the mountain and want to get to some place in the valley, a GPS will usually route you over Fouche Gap Road. There is a perfectly good road with no sharp curves and no steep grades that can take you into the valley, but Fouche Gap is a good shortcut. This is the second time a vehicle too long to make the curves in this road has followed a GPS into disaster. Or at least a big inconvenience.
He had been taking six passengers to a farm in the valley that hosts weddings at a venue, as they say. Fortunately for the passengers, someone was coming up from the valley and could take them back down to the wedding venue. I know you’re wondering why they needed a bus that size for six passengers. Me, too, but I didn’t ask.
The front wheels of the bus were right at the edge of a fairly deep ditch. The back of the bus was scraping the pavement. He couldn’t come or go. I was a little surprised that he had made it up the south side of the mountain, because there is another serious hairpin curve on that side. The big difference is that that curve is closer to level, while the one that trapped the bus takes a steep dive down through the curve.
I suggested that he get a bulldozer, and then set his bus on fire and push it off the road, but he said he had already called for a big wrecker.
The dogs and I continued down to our normal turnaround, and then came back up. A couple of cars passed us on their way up. I tried to flag them down, but one couldn’t figure out what I wanted him to do. No worry. He found out soon enough.
The guy in the pickup that’s turning around in the photo above is someone I speak to when he passes me and the dogs. He stopped this time, and asked whether something was still across the road. I couldn’t quite understand what he said, but I figured he must be talking about the bus, so I said, “Yes.” Then he said he had brought his chain saw to get it off the road. I was a little puzzled by that, but as he drove off I called out, “That might work.” I think I meant,”That probably won’t work.” But then I replayed his words in my mind and realized he had asked about a tree across the road.
The big wrecker showed up just as I came back up to the bus.
I thought about staying to watch what happened. I think the wrecker was going to pick up the back of the bus and move it over. It would have been interesting to watch, in a large-machine-at-work kind of way, but I thought it might take a while. That was a good decision (on a day with some not so good decisions, fortunately not my own), because it was about two and a half hours later before I heard the wrecker and the bus come back to the top of the mountain.
A couple of months ago Leah and I were coming up the mountain and found the road blocked at the second hairpin curve on the south side. It was a big tractor-trailer truck carrying chickens. The driver said his GPS had routed him over Fouche Gap. The front of his truck was pushed up against the bank at the side of the road, and his trailer wheels were off the pavement, perilously close to a steep drop-off. The wrecker he called was probably the same size as the bus wrecker. It might even have been the same wrecker. In that case, we had to take the 10-mile detour out the nice, level, no-sharp-curve road into the valley and then up the far side to our house. I never found out how the truck driver got back off the mountain, but the truck was gone the next time we drove down, so he must have managed somehow.
On the bus job, the wrecker had backed down from the intersection at the top of the mountain, somewhere around a quarter to a third of a mile. When he got the bus unstuck, the bus driver had to back up to the top of the mountain. At least he wasn’t towing a trailer.
I think a sign on Huffaker Road warning of very sharp curves might save some trouble on Fouche Gap Road. I think I’ll suggest that to the county, even though it will reduce the drama on the mountain.
Lorraine was Leah’s mother’s sister, the last of that generation in Leah’s family. Although they lived in Winston-Salem, NC, and we didn’t get a chance to see her often, she was Leah’s favorite. The last time we saw her was at least five years ago, although Leah spoke to her often, or at least as often as she could actually get her to answer her phone.
Her health had been deteriorating for some time. She was in and out of the hospital and nursing homes. At the end, she was diagnosed with uterine cancer, untreatable at her age and in her condition.
Leah is still in the stage of thinking about calling her to tell her about something that has happened here. That passes, of course. She will miss her aunt.
I wrote about milestones in my last post. This is another milestone, but not a welcome one.
Copyright 2013 Mark V. Paris
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