I drove back out new years day to survey the area a little better. It wasn't too bad in Hastings, but as I drove west of there on highway 6 it got nasty. This was largely the norm out there. Pole after pole after pole....down. On and on from just west of Hastings to at least Holdrege. Exceptions were locations where they had some block from wind, or where they ran n-s. That is a massive area and I can't imagine how many poles that comes to or how long it will take to fix them all. This shot was southeast of Kearney just south of I80.
This is the guide wire to a pole with a good 2 inches of ice on it.
There are poles on this side of the highway(looking forward...right side of road), you just can't see them because they are on the ground.
A stop sign. That is just crazy. Just look how thick it is on the back of the round part of the sign.
I saw this while driving along more damanged poles. Chopped the top right off.
I saw one of these windmills while on I80 coming back home. The blades were going around fast and it looked like the "blades of death" with the ice on it. Look how the ice grew as it spun around lol. There wasn't any wind now, otherwise I'm guessing this would still spin like the one I saw the day before.
After seeing more and more of it it began to get pretty sad. Something so beautiful to look at has caused such extensive damage.
On and on and on. Note all the lower portion of the poles on the right.
If it was an east-west line and was at all in the open it was usually like this.
I wonder how many cattle are roaming back yards right now. I wonder if they enjoy no fences. This one looked at me like, "what the hell happened".
More freaky pieces of taller grass.
It is pretty wild that this can happen like this.
Thank god for technology. I was quickly filling up flashcard after flashcard. I'd then hook the cam up to the laptop and empty them to it.
Major transmission lines down just south of Keaney. These are large and are metal. They continued on all screwed up down that road.
I presume this is the chopper the governor and power folks were flying around in.
I wish they would have flown closer to me. I was looking for something to put in the shot with it but it was always too far off that it wasn't working well. I'm not sure these are the same choppers. The first one seemed much larger.
Sun dog.
I have no idea what the hell was burning down there. This was near Minden looking sw.
EDIT: I guess this was a house fire about 6 miles southwest of Minden.
Another shot of the loose cattle.
Some of these scenes along the tracks looked so cool. It's pretty much impossible to shoot icy scenes into the sun and get them to look like they did in person. Hmmm, HDR might have been interesting on this(high dynamic range imaging).
Sunset.
I finally found these....a bit late. I'm zoomed way in from the highway north of Minden. Anything that wasn't a main highway was obviously covered in ice. I had 4 wheel drive and didn't mess with them too much. Those are the major transmission lines, crumpled like they were toys. This wasn't just happening in southern NE but southwest KS as well. What a historic storm. The dollar figure on this one will certainly be in the 10s of millions....or most likely 100s of millions. It was much more widespead than simply Nebraska. I'd say areas of Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska will all be declared disaster areas, if they haven't already.