Storm damage

Saturday 7^th July, 2018

What a week! We had the night of the thunderstorm on Monday 2^nd; violent thunder and lightning all through the night, with power off from about 11pm until about 8am Tuesday morning. On Wednesday 4^th, it started rumbling off in the west mid-morning and faded away again. Then late afternoon, back it came with a vengeance – not only thunder and lightning, but torrents of water and a howling roaring wind that thrashed the trees round about the mill in a scary way. The power went off again almost at once.

Dh was downstairs checking the electrics and I was sitting cuddling Tim when there was a bang, a crash and the windows behind me blew open with another crash. The wind had blown open the shutters in the balcony room (they were pulled closed but not fixed and the windows were open because of the heat) The gust of wind slammed the door in the hall and knocked out a small pane of glass and the big windows at the end of the living room banged. I leapt up and ran to secure the shutters and found the floor of the balcony room very wet where the rain had blown in. DH arrived upstairs at the gallop wondering what all the noise had been.

Fortunately the only damage was the small pane of glass from the lovely old hall door. The rest was mopping up and fixing all the shutters properly, which meant we were in semi-darkness, so there was a hasty rummage in cupboards to find candles. Then dh found water pouring through a conduit into the same cupboard as the electrics…. after a hasty mop-up there, we traced that back upstairs and found the downcomers from the roof – and it is a huge roof – had carried all the dust and debris into the drain that runs along the bolly and then plunges down under the house. It was blocked and the water was backing up. So we unblocked it and next morning we spent a good hour cleaning that out.

The storm final moved off, but by then it was too late and dark to do anything. Next morning everything seemed quiet. I took Tim for his early morning trot around the lake and discovered three, maybe four big trees damaged. Two big walnut trees in the garden have lost major branches, the old quince tree by the well has a broken branch and at the far end of the lake by the log store, a huge tree had snapped, fallen and broken another tree in the process. One branch has speared through the log store roof.

None of those will be dealt with until some sort of mechanical power is used. There are hundreds of smaller branches littering the ground and those we can move, we will. There are other, smaller trees that have fallen or partially fallen within the woods but luckily nothing had blocked the drive.

The real problem was no power. Friday morning we made contact with the neighbours and heard that the high tension line that supplied power to the area was down, and no one knew how long it would take to repair. In a way it was a relief to know that it wasn’t only us without electricity, but that didn’t solve the problem. We had several days food supply in the freezer and the fridge and by Friday it was starting to unfreeze.

There was nothing for it but to cook everything on the gas barbecue, and we spent a couple of hours doing that on Friday around 6pm. We braved another cold shower (my second and dh’s third, since he had been unlucky enough not to have had his shower when the power went out on Wednesday!) and retired to the balcony room to read. The pool is filled with leaves and dirt, but there’s no power to clean it. No tv, no computer, and my ipad was down to 19% charged. Things were looking dire. We retreated to bed about 9.30pm while we could still see what we were doing, and suddenly dh saw the electric clock had sprung back into life. 9.40pm and we had power! We could look forward to a cup of coffee and a hot breakfast in the morning!