Submitted by dpceee t3_110sx04 in WorcesterMA
Hello everyone,
I am thinking about the 2008 ice storm, and I am curious to see if people in this subreddit have been around long enough in the city to remember it first hand. I would like to hear some of the stories from that once-in-a-lifetime event.
No pics but I remember it first hand. I was living in Westborough at the time and working at Saint Gobain, and I remember getting stuck for hours in traffic on the way home.
I remember standing on Pleasant Street and just hearing loud cracks every 30 seconds and - boom - tree branches would fall.
I was working down in Worcester that day, and by early evening the trees were so weighed down by ice they were literally exploding into toothpicks and ice cubes. It was spectacular from my safe vantage point, at the time. Honestly didn’t think that much of it until I got home to Ashburnham, and saw the neighbors fence crushed by a tree, and my backyard was a complete wreck. We lost power for only about 24 hrs. I had to drive around downed limbs and power lines to get to a grocery store that was running by generator. I hope it never happens again, and I now pay very close attention to that potential weather combination.
Oh yeah. You could hear trees absolutely exploding everywhere. It was crazy! We had the National Guard out here helping with the aftermath. I lived right down the street from the water tower in my town, so we got our power back on in a few days, but my mom's house is a mile away and without electricity for a couple weeks. We had a run of wild weather and some insane storms for a few years after that, but that's the only one I remember as being totally catastrophic. Even Snowtober wasn't as bad.
I will never forget that sound of trees breaking, it is a truly scary sound.
I remember being woken up by the sound of trees cracking, but I had know idea what was going on at first, I was very confused
I was living in Sturbridge then and we didn't have any problems to speak of the roads were good and the power never went out. Parts of Worcester, Holden, Rutland, Hubbardston, and Princeton got hit pretty hard, trees and power lines were down. You couldn't buy a generator anywhere in Worcester county. I had coworkers that didn't have power for six weeks. One of the good things that came out of it was a real American thing. Everyday on the way to work I'd see power company trucks from all over the place, from places like Missouri, Nebraska, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania and the Carolinas. Over a few months it had to have been a few hundred. We got a lot of the same help when the tornado hit us in 2011. We lucked out with that, no damage but neighbors up the road got wacked.
We managed to get a generator, somehow. I do not remember how my father did it. It was only enough to power the fridge, freezer, and the pellet stove.
Luckily, we have a gas stove, so we could still use that without the electric starter.
I think that anyone who owns a house in a vulnerable area ought to have a generator. You can have a portable generator hard wired into your home with it's own circuit breaker panel. The size of the generator depends on your house. Any generator, portable or permanent needs to be started once a month and run for awhile. The other option is home standby generators, also called whole-house generators, they are permanently installed by a pro and have insulated weatherproof housing that keeps them relatively quiet. The advantages? They kick on automatically when the lights go out, and they can power everything in your home at once. They also self start and run once a month. These are expensive but convenient and last about 15 years before they need to be replaced. There are also solar options just coming on the market, I'd wait on that to see how that technology progresses.
You've described exactly what we did after the storm, except we went with the more simple option. The hookup is on the outside of the house and there is a four switch panel in the basement that controls that.
However, we've not gotten it so sophisticated, since our generator is in 80-90 year old garage. The generator we got still needs to be plugged into the outside of the house, but that's better than snaking an orange extension cable through the house.
I had friends in Princeton at the time, and they were without power for 15 days. It was a truly surreal situation
My most striking memory from that Storm was Southbridge not canceling school. We didn't get hit as hard as a lot of the surrounding towns but conditions outside were still very dangerous and a lot of our teachers didn't live in town so they were expected to commute from areas that were hit a lot harder than we were.
Also if you lived within a mile of school you had to walk, couldn't bus. (Or something, don't remember the actual distance.) Which was DANGEROUS.
Needless to say almost no one actually showed up. I didn't go in, even my 1/4 mile walk was kind of terrifying downhill after an ice storm, and a lot of teachers just called out. One of mine remarked that she took ten minutes to get down her frozen steps, hit the pavement, immediately busted ass, and said fuck this and called in too.
I played a lot of Fallout 3 cause we were lucky enough to not lose power.
Not in Worcester, but a bit north. We lost electricity when a huge tree at the corner park went down and took the lines with it. But were only without electric for about a day. Street behind ours was without electric for about two weeks. I was keeping my horse at a place that the owner of the property lived there, which was good since the streets were impassable for several days due to downed trees and power lines. A large limb from the property behind ours fell and crushed our chicken coop, leaving a gaping hole in it. So I had to bring the hens into the mudroom for a day or two while we cut the branch up and repaired the coop.
The sledding hill I used had a full soccer field at the bottom and on a normal occasion you wouldn’t even make it to the field but during that storm people were full speed hitting the fence on the opposite side of the field. Skating around the streets was also a blast
I have several photos that I took on the morning after around the burncoat street area.
Oh, if you have those, I would like to see them. I am from Burncoat.
The one with the maple tree snapped in half is harrowing.
The_Mahk t1_j8ay6va wrote
Not Worcester but I was in townsend when it happened. It was my senior year of high school and we were out from the day it happened through the middle of January. I didn’t have power for 12 days, used our wood stove for heat, cooking, and melting snow to be able to flush our toilets. If we didn’t already have 4 cords of wood and a functioning wood stove we would’ve been absolutely fucked.
There were power lines down for days and we didn’t get our comcast restored until the first week of January. The town next door, ashby, was using their elementary school as a refugee camp essentially and people were delivering things to one another using 4 wheelers and such given the state of emergency we were in. Pepperell the town also next door had power back after a day, so after five days I was able to go to a friends house for a proper shower.