State of Emergency

My parents are among the 75% of Tulsa area residents to be without power following the ice storm that has resulted in Bush declaring a state of emergency for the state of Oklahoma today. Across the state, over 600,000 homes and businesses have no electricity. My parents' neighbor managed to talk to an actual human being at the electric company, who said that their neighborhood will have their power back on, "by latest Tuesday, December 18."

Fortunately, my grandmother has an old-fashioned gas oven that she can turn on for heat, so my parents are staying with her.

My mom called me yesterday from my parents' house, where they went back to check on the cat (who was totally freaked out - the neighbor reported that ice-covered branches kept crashing down loudly throughout the night) and they found that the maple tree in the front yard had lost all of its branches across the driveway, totally blocking them both by car and by foot. My dad's car (his new Civic), which had been parked outside, had a thick layer of ice such that there was no way to get into it; it had also narrowly escaped being smashed by the fallen tree branches. Our conversation was cut short when my dad reported that it was starting to rain again in the below freezing conditions and they needed to get back to my grandmother's house while the roads were still reasonably safe.

Today, I missed my mom's call from the brief visit to check the cat because I was at my last final at school, but she left a message that my grandmother is now without telephone service due to a fallen tree taking out the line and that she will not be available by cell as the companies are requesting they be used for emergencies only. So we're on a no-news-is-good-news policy right now. I hope the primary problem over the next week is one of absolute tedium as they wait this thing out. (Being stuck in one's mother-in-law's house without even the diversions afforded by daytime TV has to suck. And by diversions, I mean diverting the attention of my grandmother who will, in the absence of compelling distraction, talk to you forever no matter how obviously you are trying to read your book. This presents a problem for a fundamentally polite person like my mother.)

It feels very strange to be cut off from contact in this way, to have received this message and have no way of responding.

From what she said on Monday, the casino where my dad works was open (I believe they have their own back-up generators). They tend to get a lot of customers when the weather is bad, even when the majority of people and businesses in the area aren't without electricity. No word yet on whether my dad has made it into the office or how absolutely swamped they must be with otherwise bored, cold people looking for something to do and someplace heated to do it in. (There is only so much sex a person can have, after all, and it's not so fun to take your clothes off when the temperatures is in the 40s in your house.)

The Tulsa World has a slide show here; I recommend it with the captions on.

Here are some good shots of icy trees from the Norman (near Oklahoma City) area.