ICE-OCALYPSE 2014

Living in the South, you get used to almost never seeing anything in the way of frozen precipitation; anything aside from hail, that is, which is odd because it typically accompanies severe thunderstorms that hit our part of the world during the warmest, most humid times of year. We Southerners are more accustomed to sweltering heat than frigid cold, so on the rare occasion that the skies part and something icy does fall we tend to panic (sometimes unnecessarily as school districts, government offices, businesses, etc. located here have been criticized - read, made fun of - for being too quick to pull the trigger on closing up shop at merely the threat of wintry weather). Bread and milk become hard to find, a fact I've never understood because neither of those are food items that hold up all that well (I'd sooner go for something canned like Beanie Weenies and Spam, personally, but that's just me), and people forget how to drive with any sense of caution. These sound like stereotypes regarding Southern culture but that's the thing about stereotypes, usually they're at least partially true which is what makes them funny and/or offensive depending on your point of view.

People in my adopted hometown of Saint Matthews, SC talk about an ice storm that hit the area back in 2004 as having been a horrible scenario. I wasn't here for that one, however my wife and I did make it through a particularly rough ice storm back in January of 2011 when we were still renting a house in Orangeburg. Our home, cars, and everything around us was encased in ice during that event. At the time, it seemed like something so extreme that we'd surely only encounter it once every decade, if that.

As it would turn out, we got it again only this time much worse and less than 5 years removed.

Over the course of February 11-13, we (along with the rest of the residents of the midlands of South Carolina) endured what I have dubbed ICE-OCALYPSE 2014. The precipitation began as rain on the evening of the 11th then changed over to ice during the night. The ice continued for almost a full 24 hours, finally ending in the early portion of the 13th. My wife & I were out of work for two days because of the conditions. What was worse was the fact that power in many areas was knocked out for almost a week; we were lucky as ours was out for maybe 5 hours, total, over the entire two days we were at home. Power lines, trees, and other structures were severely damaged. The terrain began to take on the look of an area that had been hit by a hurricane instead of an ice storm thanks to all the downed limbs and trees.

I'm going to stop writing at this point and let the following pictures do (most of) the talking.

My wife and I both complained when a crew showed up to begin clearing the wooded lot beside our house to make room for a new house to be built about a month or so ago. What we didn't realize then was that they were more than likely doing us a huge favor as certain of those trees were either dead or dying. I fully believe had they not done what they did, at least one of those trees would've wound up on our house as two of them were huge pines. Just goes to show you that when you think your world is changing into something you don't want, oftentimes what it becomes is exactly what you need.

Here we are literally a week removed from the storm and aside from the huge piles of limbs stacked along the road you can hardly tell that 7 days ago our little town was covered in ice. The ice storm wasn't the last encroachment of Mother Nature that we'd encounter, though. This past Friday, February 14, we had an earthquake of all things!

The shake was centered on Edgefield, SC but it was felt all over the Carolinas. My wife & I happened to have been in our kitchen when it happened (why we were in our kitchen at nearly 10:30 PM is a story for a different time) and we knew something had caused the house to rumble. How did we know? My wife keeps a piece of cookware from Pampered Chef in our microwave; it's technically called a deep-covered baker but I refer to it as the voodoo pot because it's magical in what it can do with food. It's a heavy clay pot, more or less, and when the quake began we heard a rattling noise coming from the area of our range. My wife thought there was a pipe rattling behind the wall but I knew there were no pipes in that area. Turns out the rattling we heard was that of the lid on the voodoo pot shaking against the body of the vessel.

Remember how I said frozen precipitation is rare in South Carolina? Earthquakes aren't unheard of but they're even more rare. I'm not saying what we're witnessing is a Biblical event, but at this point if a plague of locusts hits I wouldn't be too terribly shocked.