The Snowstorm that Crippled New England

On October 29th we were getting the kids ready for the Trunk or Treat at our church when snow starting coming down hard. The Trunk or Treat was cancelled and by 9pm we had lost power. Our power went out during Hurricane Irene but only for a few hours so I wasn't that worried. The kids thought it was awesome getting ready for bed with flashlights and we went to sleep thinking we'd be up and running in the morning.

 When we woke up the next day there was still no power. Our house was a chilly 60 degrees and there was a 10 inch blanket of snow covering our yard.

 Church was cancelled so we bundled up the kids and got to work shoveling the driveway.

The girls were so excited about the snow and we didn't realize at that point how much damage it had done so we just let them play and enjoy it for awhile.

Then Taber went to go check on some of the families from church and that's when we realized how bad it was. Since the snow had come early, all the trees still had their leaves and the heavy snow made them come crashing down. Hundreds of trees and power lines were down, taking out the power for over 80% of Nashua.

Here's a video Taber took driving around our neighborhood of some of the damage. It's pretty crazy to see all the broken trees everywhere.

No power in the winter means no heat, and the forecast for the next few nights called for temps in the low 20's. Fortunately in our church we have an emergency plan that includes a list of all the people with generators in case of a power outage. The "generator families" were kind enough to open their homes for people to take hot showers, get a warm meal and in many cases, have a warm place to sleep since the temperature inside of the homes without power was dropping into the 40's.

Some of our friends with power let us bring our frozen food over to their freezer so it wouldn't go bad. Then they kindly sent me home with a pot of hot chili and homemade bread. Despite the huge inconvenience of not having electricity, it was actually kind of fun to be in campout mode at our house. We bundled up, broke out the candles and headlamps and tried to make an adventure out of it.

That night we moved all the beds down into the family room by our fireplace so we could stay warm. The fire kept us nice and toasty but the rest of the house was dipping into the 50's so we stayed contained to the family room where we played, slept, and ate.

The next day was Halloween but the city postponed trick or treating for a week and school was cancelled. I felt really bad that the girls had been jipped out of trunk or treat, Teya's class party, and now trick or treating. Luckily our friends who live 40 minutes south in Massachusetts had power and invited us to trick or treat with them since their city was still doing it. The girls had a blast (pictures to come later) and when we came home we were overjoyed to find that our power was back on!

The next few days we hosted families who still didn't have power. People came to shower, do laundry and sleepover. School was cancelled all week until Friday and our internet and phones didn't come back until then either. Luckily by Friday most of our city was up and running again but our poor neighbors in Connecticut were still without power for another week! 

In the end we spent 40 hours without power.  It was a crazy adventure that taught us a lot about emergency preparedness in the winter and gave us a new sense of gratitude for things like central  heating, our dishwasher and Cam's white noise machine : )