Still No Power

Greetings from the College Park Hampton Inn, our home away from home, at least for tonight. It's got all the modern conveniences -- air conditioning, hot water, Internet access...that our house lacks at the moment. According to PEPCO's map, outages in PG County are down to 1,697. Unfortunately, we're one of them. There's a tree on the power line down the street and no sign of PEPCO, so the prospects seemed dim for a restoration tonight.

Here are some pictures I took yesterday.



The first one shows our broken tree after the tree guy had done some initial work. We're hoping it'll survive, but we're not sure.




The second one shows the damage done to our fence, either by the initial treefall or the subsequent tree work.



The next two show that the damage isn't too extensive...one post has to be put back into position, the top bar has to be popped back in, and we're most of the way there.




The final picture shows our next-door neighbors' front yard. I suspect this tree will cause further problems restoring power after the one a couple door down is taken care of.

Powerless

We had quite a storm yesterday afternoon. In terms of sheer tree destruction, it beat Isabel. There, we had to go to the end of the block to see a downed tree. This time, we had only to go into our back yard. That was the second biggest tree on our lot. If I remember correctly, that's a 4-foot fence, which would make that tree around 50 feet tall -- snapped in half by the wind.


We weren't the only ones with tree trouble. Our next-door neighbor had an oak fall across the alley behind our house. Glad we don't park back there! The scene was reported up and down the block. Both of our next-door neighbors had huge branches come down in their front yard. (By huge, I mean tree-sized.)

Fortunately, the destruction seemed to be fairly localized. The green area in the map is the area with the most customers out of power -- our ZIP code and an adjacent one. I'm hoping that means we're at the top of the priority list -- unlike Isabel, where the whole metro area needed help. (You can check PEPCO for an updated map -- in the time since I uploaded the copy here, a third ZIP code has gone green.)