BOOM! and Then Blackness

On Thursday I had just taken three pans out of the oven when I noticed my cell-phone had one bar. As the kids sat down for dinner I said, "Check your phones. Make sure you have enough bars. I better charge mine because I think we're going to lose power." The moment I finished saying that we heard a large "BOOM!" and then blackness. Another large crackling sound immediately followed causing my son to say, "That's a gunshot." So what does he do? He runs outside to see what's going on. This is what he found...

To give you a better daylight view, this was the scene the following morning:

One of the large pine trees in the park across the street fell down taking the power lines, the electric pole in my yard, which snapped like a toothpick, and dislodged, bent and broke my rooftop pole, along with it.

The wires were hanging on my house and spread across the driveway, and up and down the street. As soon as my son reported the dangling wires, the first thing I did was navigate down the darkened basement stairs with my tiny flashlight and switch off the main electricity from the fuse box. Even though we had no power I just felt like this was something I should do that. I don't know why.

Now, it's dark when this happening, and as you can see from the first shot, there is ice and snow on the road and it's still coming down. Well, at the very moment this snapping of the wires occurs, a car is trying to make it up my hill. If I had a penny for every vehicle who tries to get up that hill in a storm and wipes out, I'd be rich! Not only does this vehicle wipe out, but the wires fall on top of her car.

My son sees the woman come out of her car and goes over to help her, but she totally ignores him. She's crying on her cellphone, as she tries to walk up the hill through the wires, and won't even acknowledge that the boy is standing out there with no coat on offering her his arm to help her navigate the wires that she doesn't see! He makes sure she clears the danger zone before coming back in the house.

She was the first of many who made us realize sometimes the worst comes out in people during a crisis.

To be continued...I've got a lot of laundry to do.