The Iceman cometh...

It's been a wild past few days in the Paducah area. It started with freezing rain Monday night and Tuesday. That was only the beginning.

I made it to work OK Tuesday. When we got home, our power went out about 4:30pm. Fortunately (in a rare bit of foresight on my part) I had reserved rooms at the Drury Suites in Paducah. We headed down there and checked in. It broke my heart to see people come in needing a room and not being able to get one. I almost gave ours up a couple of times. There was no cable (sparing me having to watch UK lose to Ole Miss) but we had electricity. I woke up in the night to see they'd lost power at our hotel. Despite that, everything stayed warm and they were even able to provide breakfast for us.

There was ice everywhere Wednesday morning and several inches of snow on top of that. Everything was closed. I finally got out to run by home to get provisions. It wasn't horribly slick (I fortunately still have my 1989 S-10 Blazer with 4WD) and I made it OK. The big problem was dodging downed tree limbs and power lines. I had to backtrack several times. I finally ended up on 286 and got to our road. I met Jesse Hunt on a front end loader. His dad (Darren known here as Little Doc) and he had cleaned off most of the road. I got within about a quarter mile of the house and ran into some limbs which I was able to manhandle out of the way. I got in and got food, clothing, board games and our two Nintendo DS's. I left food for our cats as well.

I finally went by work. I had gotten a voice mail on the home phone about issues. When I got there, it turned out all of our WAN links to all other USEC sites were out so I could do nothing about that. I made it back to the hotel OK.

We spent a pretty enjoyable afternoon playing Scrabble, Yahtzee and just talking. We ate the food I'd brought and the hotel even managed to get soft drinks and ice, salad, chips and salsa and pretzels to eat. Josh went out to walk around and see what was open. He was stopped by a policeman who told him there was a curfew and he needed to go back (the policeman was nice about it).

Whenever a gas station would open up, people would converge on it. I heard numerous reports on the radio about this type of thing (I again showed amazing foresight and had filled up Tuesday night). I would see huge lines (like in the late 70s Arab oil embargo days) at the stations. They'd run out of gas and then people would leave and look for another open station.

Power finally came back on the hotel about 6:00. There was a curfew so we didn't go out to try and eat. We had plenty to eat and we felt bad about going out when other people who needed something were going too. I was able to talk to my parents and find out they were ok. Donna discovered by going to the top floor of the hotel she could get a cell phone signal (it's been spotty at best) so we went up there to make a few phone calls then we went to bed.

The amount of downed power lines and tree limbs are almost unbelievable. I saw numerous poles snapped as well. There was an army of repairmen at our hotel this morning heading out to work, but I still have to believe it'll be days before this is all back to anywhere near normal. Please keep the people here in your prayers.

The Drury Suites has been great through all of this. They've bent over backwards for everybody here. The young man serving food has been here for four straight days and was just as nice and congenial as he could be. They've always been one of my favorite hotel chains and this only confirms that for me.