Ice Storm Both Deadly and Beautiful

Ice-covered berries

Ice-covered berries in my back yard

This past weekend many folks in the Northeast experienced a serious ice storm (AP link, Yahoo link). Over 200,000 homes and businesses in the Albany, NY area lost power on Thursday night… including us. Driving to work Friday morning was more like a video game — pitch black conditions in unlit neighborhoods, roads blocked by trees you couldn’t see until you were almost on top of them, emergency vehicles redirecting you through unfamiliar detours, and semi-busy intersections with no traffic light to follow. Yes… it was crazy.

Work lost power Friday so they closed the plant at lunchtime. I went home and surveyed the tree damage, taking pictures of both destruction and beauty. The iced-berries you see featured here was my favorite shot. A few more are included at the end of this post.

Today many folks are still without power. Some friends over the weekend recount similar scenarios — no power, therefore no running sump pump in the basement, therefore any rain, melting ice and snow must be hand-carried in buckets out of basements! Major bummer! :-|

My back yard trees glistening with ice

My back yard trees glistening with ice

[caption id="attachment_695" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Mulberry Tree On Our House and Deck"]Mulberry Tree On Our House and Deck[/caption]
Mulberry Tree On Our House and Deck

Mulberry Tree On Our House and Deck

u comment i follow 15 Comments

  1. Mookie M.
    Posted December 16, 2008 at 7:48 am | Permalink

    Yea I live in Long Island and for some reason, I dont see much snow this year…

  2. Rob
    Posted December 16, 2008 at 2:08 pm | Permalink

    :D you have to many trees

  3. gladi8or-666
    Posted December 16, 2008 at 2:09 pm | Permalink

    cool! i wish i had that in my back yard, i get is a frozen pit of ice, 5 feet of snow, slush, and a huge ice spike hanging over the door, ring my door……..at your own risk! bwahahahahahaahhahahahaha!!!!!!( im NOT knockin’ that thing down either ;) ha!!!!)

  4. T.J. Mock
    Posted December 16, 2008 at 6:58 pm | Permalink

    Ice storms are so cool…..

    being from Georgia we get them maybe once a year (i’ve seen snow like 3 times in my entire life, not counting a ski-trip to west virginia)

    its funny that you said driving to work…..if we get a heavy frost everything shuts down.

    Its comic. Everybody stocks up on water and non-perishable food.

    I don’t know what would happen if we ever got what some of you Yankies get.

  5. TJ Mock
    Posted December 17, 2008 at 1:08 pm | Permalink

    No pun intended….

  6. Posted December 17, 2008 at 4:17 pm | Permalink

    Wow, those photos are beautiful! Living here in southern Florida, it just seems to foreign to me to see snow and ice. Here it’s about 80 degrees at the moment — I broke a sweat working outside earlier.

  7. John3Sobieski
    Posted December 18, 2008 at 10:53 am | Permalink

    I love winter. Tonight and into tomorrow, southeast Michigan is supposed to get 7-10 inches of snow, meaning no school. :)

    Also, we have a pond in the back yard purpose-dug for playing hockey on, so we have a good time when it freezes over. Everyone in my family knows how to skate. Having to clear the snow off can be a bummer, but it’s a lot easier since we bought a snow blower a few years ago.

    The only real bad thing I can think of about the snow we’re getting here in Michigan is that my brother is supposed to be flying in on leave from the Naval Academy in Annapolis. It wouldn’t be good if he had to land in bad conditions, or if my parents had to drive him home on slick roads.

  8. Heather
    Posted December 18, 2008 at 7:30 pm | Permalink

    I talked over some ideas with the guys at work for the next time power goes out… i now have a concept to heat my apartment from my gas powered hot water heater that involves turning a garden hose into a heat exchanger.

    Can you tell i’m an enginerd?

  9. Posted December 23, 2008 at 12:36 pm | Permalink

    @gladi8or-666
    Cool… the icicle from hell! :-)

    @T.J. Mock
    You should see some of the conditions we drive in up here. There are lots of stores with lots of sales and ain’t no snow (even a foot) will stop these people. I grew up in Buffalo where the snow was actually much worse than Albany.

    @Dara
    You southern-folk should get the pleasure of driving up here in Winter some time. :-) Three-lane expressways usually go to a more “free-form” lane system (because you can’t see the road at all, let alone lane striping)… mostly people just use two “mental” lanes, with the occasional idiot trying to pass multiple people in their big SUV — only to end up off the road about mile further. :-)

    @John3Sobieski
    Your brother’s at the Naval Academy? Cool.

    Yeah, the snowblower is a MUST have item for anyone with a non-trivial driveway. MY driveway is 150 feet long, so there’s no practical way to shovel, period.

    @Heather
    Aaahhh… the conversation that pops up once the computers are off. :-) I was stuck (with 5 others) waiting for our Chinese food! Can you believe it? And they weren’t letting anybody on site once they closed it so we had to “hike” to the West gate to meet up with our delivery guy. Oh well… seeing as how once I got home there was no way to make myself hot food I appreciated waiting for my beloved beef with broccoli. :-)

  10. Paul
    Posted December 28, 2008 at 3:28 pm | Permalink

    That berry photo is beautiful. I’ve never seen anything like it.

    Out of interest, were you able to see the stars a lot better when all the lights were out?

  11. Posted January 10, 2009 at 4:59 am | Permalink

    Your photography talent is truly inspiring, im sure that you could make a comfortable living as a professional photographer, just like your “winter-chill-wallpaper” those images scream brass monkeys at me.

  12. Posted January 16, 2009 at 10:21 am | Permalink

    @Paul
    Absolutely… the only way to capture stars is in the absence of all competing light. That’s why big telescopes are located away from cities and up on mountains to better cut through the atmosphere.

    They even lift telescopes up on massive balloons near the arctic to get super-precise pictures.

    @European Toxic Clan
    Thank you for your kind words. I”m hoping to post a better (slightly post-processed) version of the berries shortly.

  13. Posted January 22, 2009 at 4:15 pm | Permalink

    I live in Rochester NY so I’ve experienced a few ice storms. I’ve always looked at them in a negative light… don’t want to chip ice off of my car, hate having to walk and drive much slower, etc. Seeing that mulberry tree captured in ice is a really beautiful ice storm moment. Thanks for sharing it with the rest of us!

  14. Posted December 8, 2009 at 7:40 am | Permalink

    I never experienced an ice storm in my life, and, form what i see, I don;t think I would want one.

    But, in the same time, I love extreme weather, and I think I would like to go through such an experience.

    I liked the photo of the berry with ice on it..this tells me that you can see the positive part in something not so good, and that’s important.

  15. Dianne
    Posted June 6, 2010 at 10:03 pm | Permalink

    Here where I live, in Lake Elsinore, California, we would never see anything such as this. One year around Christmastime we woke up with snow in the hills behind our house, and everyone just freaked! It was on the news, and everything. All the gang-bangers were up there having snowball fights…. too funny….. now, if they could always be that docile, huh? It gets over 110 degrees here in the summer, though, and we have heat for 4-5 months out of the year. So, although I’m sure it was a nasty storm, you must like the weather a little at times, right? Now I have to visit New York. Never been there. We plan on going soon.

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