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The tree between the motel and the gas station was a good indicator how bad things were screwed up overnight. 10 hours(or less) ago and this tree was fine. It's now trash, thanks to constant moderate to heavy rain for hours on end....at 28-30 degrees. I'm sure I heard each and every one of those branches when they broke.
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I drove into town around 9 or 10, but found it rather hard to stay out of the way. There weren't all that many areas you'd feel safe parking a vehicle(things constantly falling all over the place). There were also lots and lots of locals out, looking at their now trashed town. So I made the trip short and went back to the motel for a while.
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Before going to the motel I stopped in this residential area next to it. While in there shooting a bit, a tree branch crashes onto one of the roofs right next to me. I have a picture of that, but I also have a million other pictures....can't add them all. There were other cars with branches on them in here. One was nice enough to land in the back of someone's pickup, like it was all ready to be hauled off....sort of.
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As I park at the motel I hear a loud, short duration "bzzzzzzzzzz" sound. I thought hmmmm, that's not good wherever that was. As I get out and walk I smell smoke, then see the smoke coming from a house down the street. There were already people from the house standing in the street(no stills of that as the camera was in my bag for the trip back in, I did shoot a bit of video though). I think the wire was laying on the roof burning or something. A couple minutes later and the fire dept shows up. I about missed this still of the fireman heading into the house. The image stabilization was not still yet, but I clicked anyway, as he'd soon be behind the tree.
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While taking stills of that scene a branch falls on the fire truck(falling branch not pictured). It was quickly becoming apparent just how dangerous the town was right now.
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This was taken next to the motel. I've never seen ice formations like this. It's not hard to understand how they form a claw like that. When the branch is horizontal, the ice forms straight down from it. As the weight increases, the branch sags. As it sags, straight down changes in relation to the branch. So the tip of the growing ice curves to keep pointing down. Pretty coo! If it wasn't raining so heavily there'd be no icicles, you'd just have solid ice around the branch. This much in the way of icicle formation makes judging ice size rather difficult. If you could merge all that into one solid piece around the branch, there'd easily be over 1 inch of ice on things. Over 2 inches of rain fell here afterall.
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Look how thick the ice is on a couple of the branches towards the bottom of this image. Two branches broke as I was shooting this large tree. If something can be called lucky out of this, it is that there was hardly any wind for the whole thing. Toss a stiff breeze into this storm and things would have been worse than the very bad they already were.
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This was my second trip into town, later in the day. I'm looking down an alley between yards(follow the tracks in front of me). While out shooting here(everywhere for that matter) it was not uncommon to hear and see branches fall in the area.
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Overtime.
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Somewhere on the north side of town...near a church.
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Across the street from the image before.
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A dangerous job? I saw what was surely a worse one....the postal folks! Can't believe they were out in this. One would think, hey the rain let up, what's going to break has probably already broke. Wrong. It was amazing to me just how long and frequent the breaking continued(even into the following day).
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You see all the icicles hanging down from the wires and think, hey that's a lot of ice. Well it's hard to tell here, but don't forget there's also ice accumulated around the wire. The icicles really added the weight though. If you look close you can see all the icicle claws on the trees.
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This was a park in the area. Just look at the ground in there.
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This ends the images from December 11th. I went back to my room and fell asleep from 4-7 pm. I was doing something on the computer and simply could not stay awake. I hit the bed and could not stay awake if someone paid me to. I was going out no matter what. I then woke up at 7, noticed it was now dark out and figured it had to be early morning before sunrise. It never is when things go like this! I look at the clock......7pm ?!?!?! I hate that, really messes with your head for a bit. I was staying at the motel a second night because I needed another day to shoot and to drive to other places. It was also still raining some(freezing rain) throughout the day. I don't remember when I went to bed the second time, probably around 1 a.m. Continue into the day on December 12th here. I've included 60 images on 6 pages from the following two days. So, there are 3 page options on each of those two days. If you get lost you can always go to the Images By Year section and all 4 days are in there. That and I added these day links below. Just remember, the next days both have 3 pages of images each.
Go to December 10 December 11 December 12(3 pages) December 13(3 pages) |
