Ice storm tree damage and hydro outage

[ssfc72]

At my area in Lindsay the hydro went out around 8 am Sunday. It was back on at 4 pm Tuesday.
I didn't have any issues with downed tree limbs at my house but the rest of Lindsay had a mess of downed tree limbs and wires with numerous streets being blocked off.
it was hard to get around town in the car with all the blocked streets.

My internet (Cogeco system) and home phone (VOIP) was down from Sunday until 4 pm today, Thursday. :-(

I have been very busy ever since Sunday, working at a friends house in Lindsay were the 25 foot high maple tree on the front lost 3 large limbs split off the tree and crash onto the front yard.
One large branch landed on the hedge, on the property line and a small section of the house eave-trough had some minor damage.
I have been cutting up the downed limbs with a swede saw and also cutting down limbs that still were attached to the main tree. Took a car load (Subaru Outback) of limbs and tree trunks to the landfill today and have the car filled again with limbs, to go to the landfill tomorrow morn. Lots more trips needed to clean up all the limbs.

[buster]

Old maple, city tree, split and now rests comfortably across the front yard, and into the backyard over the fence, and the partially broken fence is not happy. None of this would fit into your Subaru Bill.

Lost power only for 25 hours, and we have a natural gas stove in our rec room, so it wasn't too bad except for the lack of caffeine.

It's kind of you to help your friend Bill. Is she pretty?

[ssfc72]

Yes, very attractive. :-)

The Lindsay landfill has a web camera that shows the line of vehicles lined up to go over the weigh scales.
I got there this morning, Friday, at about 9:20 am. the landfill opens at 8 am and the web cam showed the line up of vehicles was out past the entrance to the landfill.
I got out of there by 11:30 am. The vehicle line up was all the way out to the highway.

[Jason]

We were lucky. Other than one half-hour period, the power didn't go off. We have numerous times where the power flickered or briefly (seconds) went off. Just enough to annoy you if you were working on the computer and getting a stern warning from my printer.

We lost the internet for a day or so. The phone service and internet worked but the data was slow as all hell and kept disconnecting for another day.

We have damaged trees down our side street and anyone in Peterborough knows we had limbs blocking off roads and many old trees all but taken out. If they were cars, you'd call them write-offs. A beautiful huge maple tree beside our driveway had major branches ripped out. I hope they don't have to take it down. With the horrible storm we had before and a windstorm the next day after the ice storm, we've lost a lot of foliage. It's sad.

I have another friend who didn't get his power back until Thursday, and he relied on it for heat. Cold showers must be rough. Do gas furnaces work when the power goes out? I know the thermostat wouldn't but I thought there might be a fall-back mode.

Aside from blocked streets forcing some buses to cancel or re-route (they cancelled service altogether for a day), they assigned heat buses where people could get on and warm up. So only half the lines were running for a few days.

[fox]

I was away for the ice storm, but when I returned I found that I had lost numerous branches from two trees, and I had a big cleanup. My power was off for three days, but was back on by the time I got home. However, the lost of heat in the house and in my aquaria resulted in the loss of 7 fish. Meanwhile, my internet also went out; the line from my house to the telephone poll that carries my internet connection was severed. I still don't have it back, but Cogeco is coming today to repair it.

[ssfc72]

It is good that you didn't have any damage done to your house from the downed tree limbs.
You must have an automatic feeder for your fish, when you are not home?

Good to hear from you, Mike.

[fox]

Yes, I was lucky. As for fish, I don't have an automatic feeder. I have vacation feeder tablets, supposedly good for 10 days, but I have pushed to two weeks.

Don't worry, I'm alive and well. Just traveling a lot. I check the PLUG site most days, but with a lot of the messages being non-Linux, I don't respond as often.

With the ice storm and my internet down, I did run into a Linux problem, but it was related to my particular setup. On the iMac that I use as my main machine, and run Ubuntu, no distro sees the internal wifi. As I couldn't find any wifi that worked automatically (i.e. without installing a driver), I ended up buying a powerline device that allows me to connect to ethernet without a wire running through my router. With the power out, my iPhone could act as a hotspot, but only to devices connected with wifi. So I was unable to get internet on Ubuntu in that way, and had to wait until my internet was restored.