Ice Storm

As I am sure many of you have heard (and some of you experienced), last weekend Oklahoma was hit by a pretty bad ice storm. Several hundred thousand people in the greater Tulsa area lost power, but we we VERY lucky to be in what seems like the one area of town that kept power throughout the whole storm. The worst of the storm hit on Sunday during the day. Starting Sunday night the hotel here became completely booked with people who had no power at home. It was absolutely amazing how many people they were able to cram into this little building!

Lucky for us Jeff had the weekend off, so we opted to stay indoors Sunday and enjoy the view from our hotel windows. On Monday Jeff had to go to work at midnight (I guess technically Tuesday morning). We needed to get groceries, but upon seeing our cars coated in over 1/2 inch of ice we decided that we would walk to Chipotle across the street. The place was an absolute zoo, probably because it was one of the only restaurants open, and because everyone from the hotel seemed to be going there. After waiting in line for about 15 minutes we learned that they were out of pork, chicken, tomatoes (also including all tomato salsas) and chips. Clearly the supply truck wasn't able to get there!

After eating we decided that we needed to try and tackle the ice covering the cars so Jeff could get to work. Jeff wasn't feeling well, so I took on the job myself. I have seen some serious snow and ice storms while living in Minneapolis, but I have never had to scrape so much ice from a car! It was insane. Here are some pictures of my car to give you an idea of what it was like.

After about an hour I was able to get both of our cars clean. Jeff headed off to work and got to see the damage as he drove. There were branches snapped off trees everywhere you looked. Some trees looked like they had been split right down the middle. Neither of us had ever seen anything like that! Unfortunately Jeff couldn't take pictures from the car, but here are a few pictures of the tiny trees in the hotel parking lot.

Even though these are small trees, you can see how the weight of all of this ice could snap branches on huge trees, thus pulling down all of the power lines.

On Tuesday I made it to the grocery store and it looked like people were stocking up for the apocalypse! Shelves with essentials (bread, lunch meat, soup, water, etc.) were completely bare. It was a surreal experience that made us realize how bad it was in the rest of the city. We really did get lucky!

It's been a week since the storm, and things are starting to look a lot better. Last I heard there are still over one hundred thousand people in the Tulsa area without power. Tomorrow is the first day that Tulsa public schools will be open, but I guess seven schools will not reopen because they still don't have power. We went to the grocery store and the shelves have been restocked. Chipotle is even offering a full menu now :) I guess slowly but surely life is getting back to normal.