Oklahoma City Ice Storm 12-11-2007

Believe it or not, this is actually a fully paved street capable of carrying traffic in two directions at the same time. This photo illustrates the damage with hundreds of trees laying in the road. At one point during this storm, I heard that 294,000 people had lost their electricity in Oklahoma City metro area with more than a million in the whole state. The electric company described this storm as the worst storm in terms of the number of customers affected since the company was founded. I did include the maping information so you can see exactly where this photo was taken. We lost our electricity on December 9th, and it returned on the evening of December 14th. On this street, they never received their power back until December 17th.

This was a week that I am not likely to forget because it was psychologically trying. When you sit in a dark house in a neighborhood with most people leaving for hotels, it does something to you. All we could see was a glowing sky from lights in the distance with silhouettes of mangled trees around us. As we would drive down the street, we would see a dim glow of a candle in the window of some houses every 10 or 12 houses. The neighborhood was abandoned at night and was reminiscent of a nuclear holocaust.
I cannot give an accurate description of this week.

I was recovering from gall bladder surgery just two days before when this ice storm hit so that was an added burden. Try to look at this whole collection at full size so you can see to what degree the damage was.