1996 Ice Storm

Today in Spokane we are having a deep freeze, after a couple of days of snow, but these picture were taken in 1996 after an ice storm in Spokane. Nearly all of Spokane was without power some for up to 8 days, and so Thanksgiving was an adventure on how to have Thanksgiving dinner without power. People got out camp stoves to cook on, fired up fireplaces, and generally froze waiting for the power company to reconnect the power.

These locust trees were in a long row in front of my dad's house and they lost about 2/3s of their limbs due to the ice buildup on the trees. Pop also had another locust tree near the back of his lot and one limb was leaning on the power line, but it did not break and his power never went out.

This was a willow tree in pop's yard, it lost a lot of limbs, but not nearly as many as the locust trees.

This linden tree is in my front yard, and while it did not lose many limbs they never straightened up after the ice melted.
I was at my dad's house when the rain was coming, and it built up about a quarter of an inch of ice everywhere. When I left his house I was walking home and it sounded like shotguns going off all around, but it was actually limbs breaking off on the trees in the neighborhood as I walked home. When I got home the power was off, but my gas stove was still working, so I was warm. The circulating fan did not work without electricity so the back part of the kitchen was pretty cold. I was working on proofreading the Mayflower Digest that had been OCR to a CD, and I was supposed to send so many pages each week back to them, but my computer needed electricity. If you have that CD I proofread volume 20. The next morning the lights across the street were on, but not mine. Mine was out 3 and a half days, but that was better than a lot of people.