Tuesday, February 11, 2025
The freezing rain began falling on Tuesday, February 11, on top of a relatively thin layer of snow. We were braced for losing power, and we heard that the governor had already declared a state of emergency and that there were crews in Floyd standing by to clear power lines and fallen trees.
wEDNESDAY, February 12, 2025
The sassafras grove in the center of our circle driveway kept bending lower and lower through the next day as the crack, thump, and roar of limbs and trees falling in the forest came thicker and faster throughout the day. The sweet birch in the front yard bent all the way to the ground, and around midday, our power went out. We started the generator in the late afternoon, much better prepared than the last time we lost power during Hurricane Helene.
tHURSDAY, February 13, 2025
By Thursday morning, most of the tops of the sassafras trees lay broken on the driveway, and the ice had melted enough to relieve the sweet birch, which didn’t suffer any but a few small broken branches. Sassafras are quite brittle, which makes many people dismiss them as junk trees. But these trees have lost huge limbs before, and within a year or two, the crowns were thicker and denser than ever before. I have hopes they’ll recover well.
A wild cherry near the head of the driveway was broken nearly all the way to the ground, visible as a horizontal trunk in front of the tractor in the photo.
The wreckage was apalling in our neighborhood alone, and certainly far and wide across the county. There were poles down everywhere, lines lying across our driveway–something I’ve never seen, trees and lines down and blocking roads here there and everywhere. So many people were without power.
Friday, February 14, 2025
We had a new pole and power back by Friday evening! Michael heard some griping on Facebook about the line men spending the days at their ease, sleeping in their trucks. He was angry, because these crews had come from as far away as Texas and Mississippi, were sleeping in their trucks after working through the night in the frigid cold and icy dangerous conditions because they were dead tired and there were no vacancies in any hotels in Floyd! Fortunately, proper gratitude was in evidence by the time I pulled up the Floyd Facebook Group.
Tuesday, February 18, 2025
Michael was called away endlessly to help this person and that with either their generator or feeding their animals. So, cleanup has been slow. He had pushed the wild cherry to the side, but it wasn’t until the next week that it got properly cut down below the terribly rending split in its trunk, and the trunk chopped into firewood lengths. I expect it to regrow as a bush. It is said that the North American cherries (Prunus sp.) can be kept to a shrub size for ease of harvest by simple topping!
We raked the limbs and brush from the driveway into the center while it was still icy and snowy, and there it still was a week after the beginning of the ice storm.
I dragged what I could into my next (prospective) Hugulkultur mound. It will need to be chainsawn into smaller pieces.
Saturday, February 22, 2025
A good amount of the brush in the driveway has been cleared away as of the Saturday a week after we regained power. But around the edges of our woods, things remain broken and hung. It will take a pole chainsaw to trim it up, which we don’t own. So, for now, we get to look at all the broken trees, evidence of quite a destructive ice storm.
