Not So Wordless Wednesday - Mother Natures Napalm

Often when visitors come to my city, I tell them Sacramento is known as The City of Trees. We actually have a Sacramento Tree Foundation, which proclaims we live in an "Urban Forest". . . Sacramentans love their trees.

There are two delightful trees that share my home with me. They are fairly well known around the neighborhood. One lives in my front yard, and is an aging, but healthy Modesto Ash by the name of Bob. The second tree, I have actually blogged about before here on ActiveRain - His name is Fred.

Yesterday, Sacramento, and much of California, woke to a storm, packing considerable ferocity - which is unusual to us in the month of October. The local weather guy tells us we generally get ½ inch of rain in October. However, this storm unloaded 3 to 4 inches of liquid sunshine. And, it arrived with high winds.

I experienced intermittent power failures mid-day Tuesday. By afternoon, a branch about 2 doors down flew into the power-lines and caused spectacular fireworks. BUT, the real drama came later at 8:30 pm, when an insulator and power line jerked loose from the pole, and catapulted onto my back neighbor's roof, bounced around a bit, while periodically hitting their rain gutters, creating scenes which should have been captured for use in the next Hollywood war movie. My house immediately went into dimmed "brown-out" state.

After shutting off my electrical panel breakers, I called the fire department once again. The system was overwhelmed by emergencies caused by downed power lines, trees, etc. The electrical arcing continued for hours during the night. Finally, around 3:00 am this morning, our utility company (SMUD) cut the lines to stop the activity.

About 95% of Sacramento had power restored by 4:30 pm this afternoon. But I was among the 5% still un-restored. I was VERY happy, when SMUD crews arrived at 5:00 pm and began giving Fred (the tree) a hair cut, as well as his other tree friends along the fence line. Once Fred's new hair style was fashioned, power was restored, and life began anew.

The pictures above, show the insulator on the back neighbor's roof, some of the repairs going on at my place, a totaled neighborhood fence, a very lucky new car that was just missed by a falling tree, and a SMUD guy showing evidence that Fred had been smoking in bed:-)