On Thursday night and early Friday morning Rensselaer had an ice storm. It was predicted, but freezing rain is a tricky thing, and a little change in temperature changes it into sleet or rain. This time the forecast was right.
We lost power early Friday morning, as did large parts of Rensselaer and the some of the country side. We also lost TV cable and our Internet connection. We got power back mid morning, but TV Cable and Internet were out until Saturday morning. The telephone did not fail--the problem of land lines is not reliability, but obsolescence.
The crash of breaking tree branches started before dawn and continued for most of the morning. There was a lot of tree damage, but it was tree branches, not whole trees, and I only saw one case where a branch hit a house, and that only hit a porch.
City crews were removing branches, and they will have several days of work before they have gotten them all.
Not all trees were treated equally. The eastern white pines took a terrible hit and I will write more about that tomorrow. You could identify them simply by looking for the huge piles of branches under them. The birches showed their flexibility by bending over, but sometimes it was not enough.
Here is a willow at SJC that found the ice a bit too much to bear.
I am not sure what kind of tree this was--it might be an elm--but it was not a good kind of tree to have this week.
Here is another.
Sometimes the problem was not with fallen branches, but branches that were down so low that they might be a problem for passing traffic. Here is an ornamental pear, a tree I have been planning to write about.
Nature attacked the Christmas
decorations both with ice and falling branches.
What has been remarkable about this ice is how long it has lasted. Usually when we get freezing rain, the ice disappears pretty quickly. But more than 24 hours later and it is all still there.
This morning (Sunday, Dec 21) we are waking up to a bit of fresh snow, temperatures below zero, and howling winds. We are getting a real winter this year.
We lost power early Friday morning, as did large parts of Rensselaer and the some of the country side. We also lost TV cable and our Internet connection. We got power back mid morning, but TV Cable and Internet were out until Saturday morning. The telephone did not fail--the problem of land lines is not reliability, but obsolescence.
City crews were removing branches, and they will have several days of work before they have gotten them all.
Here is a willow at SJC that found the ice a bit too much to bear.
Here is another.
Sometimes the problem was not with fallen branches, but branches that were down so low that they might be a problem for passing traffic. Here is an ornamental pear, a tree I have been planning to write about.
What has been remarkable about this ice is how long it has lasted. Usually when we get freezing rain, the ice disappears pretty quickly. But more than 24 hours later and it is all still there.
This morning (Sunday, Dec 21) we are waking up to a bit of fresh snow, temperatures below zero, and howling winds. We are getting a real winter this year.
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