The craziness of Wednesday’s storm

Now that I have power back on at my house, I can reflect on the storm damage that occurred late Wednesday afternoon.

The day was going smoothly and the weather seemed to be pretty nice outside or at least about 30 minutes before the storm began. I had just got back in from taking my dog for a walk around the neighborhood and decided that it was warm enough to open some windows around my house.

But the windows didn’t end up staying open that long since about 10 minutes later, I began hearing strong winds with some heavy rain and a little bit of thunder. So I closed all the windows quickly and was about to go back to my work computer.

I never got a chance to get back on my computer since the power quickly went off.

From there, everything quickly escalated even more. Once the power went out, my cell service inside the house also became very poor.

Of all times to not have good cell service, of course, happens when an important phone call is coming through from my mom.

After walking around my house to try to find enough service to call her back, I finally got a hold of her and she told me some news that I never thought I would hear. She said a tree fell on the roof and a piece of sheetrock came down from the kitchen ceiling and hit her in the head.

I quickly began to panic and was worried about my mom along with my parents’ house. Luckily, I was able to have coworkers who still had power pick up the rest of my shift so that I could go to my parents’ house as quickly as possible.

Except it wasn’t as quick as it usually is since many street lights were out and trees were down in a lot of places, so traffic was backed up and what should have been a 30-minute drive turned into an hour and a half commute.

Thankfully, my mom did not get hurt as much as she could have and ended up with a mild concussion and thankfully their house did not get too bad of damage and is repairable.

This kind of situation was not how I anticipated my upcoming four-day weekend to begin and it got a little more frustrating to come back home to no power still. We never got our power back on until late Friday night.

As frustrated as I was that it took a couple of days to get our power back on, once we did get power back on it made me think just how hard National Grid crew members had to work from Wednesday through the whole weekend in order to restore power for more than 200,000 people in the area.

I am even more thankful to workers such as National Grid crew members for the work that they do and the commitment they have to work long hours in various weather conditions just to be able to restore power for community members.

I hope those crew members are able to relax more this week because they deserve a little break after all the hours they must have put in last week. Next time my power goes out, I will think more about the workers who are diligently working to help me.