A Tree Falls...

Sooooo...if a tree falls in the forest, I don't know what the hell happens but if it falls 20 feet from your living room window, it will hardly make a sound. I should know.

Last night, about 10pm, I was happily working on my computer in the living room when I heard a sort of scratching noise. I thought it was a cat jumping on a window screen (an all too common occurrence) and then a soft "whoosh" noise like when you close a door in an air tight house. If that was all that happened, I would have never thought a thing of it.

But then the power went out.

It would seem that one of the very large (about 50 feet or so), very old Elm trees in our yard just decided to call it quits. There was no wind of any kind--a beautiful, quiet evening. There was no warning except for those faint scratching/cracking noises. It just fell...and utterly destroyed our power lines.

The tree fell directly onto the main line that connects the transformer pole to our meter/yard light pole. The meter pole snapped completely in two and thus took ALL of the yard lines (connecting to barns, etc) with it to the ground. The yard was literally covered in downed lines. A scary sight indeed! I called 911 (because I couldn't find a power bill to call the company--put that number in your phone people!) and had deputies and the power company here is really short order.

Thankfully our power comes from a small, local coop and they got the power cut last night for safety and were back right away this morning and got our power back on and clean-up started...those guys ROCKED! Tomorrow we work on the rest and I am deeply thankful today that we live in South Dakota with such great law enforcement, local utilities, neighbors, family and friends. I have no idea what we would have done if we didn't live here at "home" in SoDak.