Wow.
OK, so Sunday we went to church as usual, came home as usual, did all our regular Sunday stuff as usual. Watched Dallas beat Detroit at home in a surprisingly close game. Went to bed as usual... then at 4am woke up NOT as usual. The power was out, so I got up and called the power company. Apparently the power was out for a lot of people... there was some ice during the night. It was cold, so I went and got our 7-year-old and took him to our bed so he wouldn't get cold and we toughed it out until morning.
In the morning we started calling around for someone with electric so we could get into a warm place. My mom and dad had no power... she was planning to run her oven all day and keep the house warm that way (ultimately that worked for her). Cathy's brother with the big house in Broken Arrow was out of power too. Finally we called Cathy's dad who lives by the fair grounds... and his power was on, so we bundled up and went to his house.
There was no ice on the street... the ground temperature was comparatively warm, so the streets were OK. Except for the occasional tree limb. And WHEW, about those tree limbs! But I'll get to that in a minute. Cathy's dad's power was on when we got there, but an hour or two later... BAM! no power. We had plenty of flashlights, though, and some battery- and oil-powered lanterns, and he lit the burners on his gas stove to keep the place warm, so our main enemy was plain old boredom. A few hours later the power came back on, but not the cable TV... fortunately we had lots of DVDs to help keep my little boy occupied (it ALMOST worked!) and except for a few flickers and one 20-minute blackout, the power hasn't gone back off. Later we learned that we are about two blocks from the main staging area that the power company is sending the emergency trucks out from, which probably explains why we had power when everyone else outside of our immediate area was still dark.
As of yesterday afternoon, my house in East Tulsa was still without power. According to the Tulsa World this morning, 220,000 homes in the Tulsa area are still dark... I understand that the ice took out the power of half a million homes across the state. Oklahoma has been declared a federal disaster area, with $5 million in aid to go to local governments to help with debris removal. All those tree limbs! It's incredible the size of some of the tree limbs (and whole trees) that were taken down by this ice. My father-in-law has part of his magnolia tree on his roof now, although luckily it doesn't appear to have done any damage. Yesterday the power company estimated for my wife that our power would be on today, so let's hope.
The power is also out at my church... if you click that link and get nothing it's because their Web server is still down. :) I don't think the power ever went down where I work downtown. I didn't come in to work Monday or Tuesday (my boss said not to) but I expect to be business as usual from here on out.
UPDATE: a friend of ours wrote a pretty cool blog post about the ice storm a few weeks after the fact.
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