The Naked Truth about New England’s State of Emergency
I took a drive from Boston on Saturday to New Hampshire and witnessed some of the devastation wrought by the ice storm that hit on Friday. Of course I brought with me my trusty camera and got a bunch of images.
This view is through the car windshield looking out on the roadside where you can see a line of birches and poplar weighed down by ice, their tops probably frozen to the ground.
Closer look at a coated birch whose top has snapped off from the stress.
The damage wasn't confined to small trees. Limbs comparable to this one fell and took power lines down with them.
A closer look at one of the branches from the tree above.
The sun shining brightly through the trees makes them glint and shine. When they wave in the breeze, the ice cracks and makes a tinkling kind of music.
If you look closely, you can see the refraction of light into a rainbow. This bush looked like it was covered in prisms.
First responders really detest this kind of weather. The temperatures yesterday when I took the photos were still below freezing.
Getting close to these ice-covered pine seedlings illustrates how thick and uniform the ice covers everything. In the quantity that it fell, it's quite dangerous.
This part of the road (yes, this is an interstate highway) was closed down to one lane on the way to New Hampshire and was still blocked on the way back which for me was after dark.
Gas stations had lines of cars at them going on for blocks. I surmise that people had run out of fuel for their generators and many stations were closed due to lack of electricity. On my trip back to Boston last night, I drove through a medium-sized city in Massachusetts that was eerily dark but that had one gas station open with a long line.
Both ways on this trip, I passed convoys of trucks. This one was plow vehicles cleaning up the road in New Hampshire. There were several long files of power trucks with buckets. One line had more than 17 vehicles in it.
Many side roads in communities hardest hit were blocked to traffic.
Mt. Monadnock remains stoically in her place, surrounded by ice. However, the mountain is closed right now to climbers because of the severe damage from the storm.
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Comments
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My thoughts and prayers are with the people of New England.
(rated)
I think of this and also the devastation to the Texas Gulf Coast area this summer where people were without power for 3 weeks or so. I feel so fortunate to have all our utilities and that I can flush whenever I want. :)
LT, when I was growing up in NH we always had a generator ready because the road we lived on was not that decent. There were a lot of woodstoves going yesterday. And surreal, you're right, the juxtaposition is dramatic.
Good pics though, you can almost feel the chill.
It's funny how this weather is the worst and most lovely at the same time.
My wife, who grew up in Vermont, says she remembers New England winters as being much less icy than your photos show, when she was a kid. Me too, from our time living in Amherst. Maybe it's natural fluctuations...
In the long run, as Climate Change happens, there may be fewer ice events, although many have opined that the effect of Global Warming in the near term, at least, is not just to heat things uniformly but to mix things around so that unusual weather events happen in more places or at more frequent intervals. The temperature is only rising on average, not at each individual moment everywhere.
If this had not been an ice event, by the way, it would have been a lot of water anyway. Leominster, MA (just to pick a kind of randomly chosen example) had 3 inches of precipitation over the weekend. Ice creates additional problems, but eventually just handling all that water is an issue, too.
The amount of water becomes a problem, as you said so well, Kent.
I remember the flame throwers mounted on backpacks in Canada.
The storm sewers plugged up with the ice melt.
This didn't start as haiku,
It won't end as haiku.
thank you for the photos......be well.
Free us, little trucks.
Resume planetwide melt... Wait!
Let's just chill a while.
Rich, the road itself was clear and dry. Here they send out those big plow trucks like you see in the photo paired up with salt trucks that spread rock salt and sand over the road. When you live here you learn early to drive in this stuff. But when it's bad and the roads are icing I won't go. You wouldn't have found me on the road on Friday. Thanks for the stylish moniker by the way. When do I get my haiku from you?
Lovely photos though. Real eye candy. Damaging to the plants, but like Christmas ornaments. Cold here tonight, about - 3° F in Boulder. The snow is light and crisp. It'll be good skiing tomorrow with 9" of fresh pow on the mountain.
thanks. cheers
Hope the skiing is good today, dynomyte, and thanks for the comment lalucas. May your day be balmy and ice-free!
Oh, brilliant pics, too.
I won't get power to my NH lake house until late this week if I am lucky. We're on a penninsul and are always last.
It has been surreal. Almost got killed once and have driven over more powerlines, and assembled more generators for people than you can imagine.
I intend to write it up. I sit here with a generator running and have the internet patched from a friend's house.
Surreal.
Ice storms sound so much less dramatic than blizzards, but they can be equally or more dangerous. The last big one here (in DC) had trees down, streets blocked & power out for weeks. In addition to the usual dangers/inconveniences, several of our neighbors were burglarized during the power outage. ouch.
and, I, too want to know what you use on your windshield!?!
Julie, glad your people are safe and GW I'll be looking forward to your updates as long as your connections hold. Carole and Zyskander, thanks for reading, looking and rating.
Awesome photos - you captured the beautiful destructive power so well.
Thumbed.
Damn that's a lot of folks without power in December.
i hope it's getting better. we're having a nasty cold snap--ten degrees is way cold for denver--but no biggie. i'm not enjoying it, though. but it's nice to have heat and power and clear roads.
An ice road photographer .
Pretty intrepid.
Thank you for the magnanimous haiku.
My family is in NH and I couldn't reach my brother for days. My father has a generator, but says all of the homes around him are dark. Beautiful photos.
Now living in California you do miss the winter weather.
Author of small battery televisions