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The "Snowtober" storm hit starting the afternoon of Saturday, Oct 29th, and continued into the morning
of Sunday, October 30th. Pictures of the aftermath of the storm are
here.
Below are screen captures of the PSNH outage map stretching from Monday, Oct 31st, through
Friday evening, Nov 4th. It's interesting to see the improvement over time. Our own power
came back at 5:50 PM on Wednesday, Nov 2nd, ten minutes shy of 4 days. It was a wonderful
feeling to have power at the flick of a finger and with no generator noise. The City of Nashua has announced a special one time pickup of branches and brush. This will start Monday, Nov 7th, and go through the month of November. They will only be going through the city one time, so everyone is supposed to have anything they want picked up on the curb by the morning of Nov 7th. I spend about 5 hours cutting branches into smaller lengths and with Heather's and Julia's help hauled it all down to the street. Pictures of the pile of detritus are after the outage maps. The picture doesn't clearly reflect how much there really was. This storm was the 3rd worst storm on PSNH record for the amount of damage caused to the power grid. Our power was out for 4 days, which is about the same as after the 2008 ice storm. Fortunately, the daytime temperatures were into the 50s, so that helped make it more bearable for people without generators. We ended up using our generator about 4 hours in the morning and then about 4 hours in the evening. We turned it off when we went to bed. I already had two 5 gallon gas bottles full and the 5 gallon tank on the generator was also full at the beginning of the storm. Tuesday morning, Nov 1st, I took the two empty bottles with me to work. The Shell stations we normally use in Nashua didn't have power yet, so I was hoping to find a place to fill up near work. I was able to fill them up at the station on the Concord, MA rotary on Route 2 near the prison. It turns out that we didn't need the fuel after all because our power came back on. My normal routine kind of got messed up by this storm. I got to work really late on Monday, in part because I had come down with quite a head cold Sunday. I didn't make it back to the gym until Thursday morning. I drove my normal way going on Moe Street over to Rocky Hill Road, then to Notingham Drive all the way over to Glenn Street. That whole neighborhood was still dark without power Thursday morning. Friday morning they had power back. On Saturday, Nov 6th, as part of the yard cleanup I also changed the oil in the generator, filled up its gas tank, and filled up all three 5 gallon bottles. I put stabilizer in all 4 containers and put it all in the shed. We are ready for the next power outage whenever it might be. |