Storms of December come Slashing

The Storms of November brought more snow and were more unexpected, but the storms of December had stronger gusts of wind and knocked out our power for longer. We actually lost power again yesterday. Needless to say having no power prevents you from doing things like blogging or painting.

Yesterday I spent time trying to review some of the job search agents that accumulated while my Internet access was limited. Today I finished putting another coat of stain on some furniture I assembled. I also am almost finished painting another miniature for my nurgle army. I’ll probably get around to blogging about those projects eventually, I made sure to take pictures. I also took pictures during the storms, unfortunately even with three batteries for my digital camera, eventually it ran out of power too. My batteries don’t last as long as they used to, even the newest amongst them.

I managed to find ten decent pictures after I synced with iPhoto. I don’t have that many pictures of fallen trees or broken trees. When we drove to Nanaimo we saw a lot of them but people come along with chainsaws and cleared the road, some even cut up the fallen trees for firewood. It is the downed power lines and telephone poles that cause more problems. Some of the poles aren’t made of wood anymore and it isn’t wise to mess with downed poles anyway.

Work crews eventually came and tried to fix some of the damage after several days with no power, then they were called away to Victoria when the capital lost power, leaving us without power for another day or so. Other people had it worse, Bamfield and some of the Gulf Islands especially. In addition to rain and wind we also got more snow which caused traffic accidents. We never received much snow in Deep Bay, at least we usually don’t.

The wind did cause more damage, it broke our Christmas lights and more importantly tore off several cement tiles from our roof. The wind and falling tiles really scared Huuna. She is a big baby and a scaredy cat. She is also really needy so you have to comfort her and tell her “It’s all right” and “Huuna’s a good dog“. She also likes to know you are there so she makes sure she is right close to you when you are on the couch.

One of the many things Huuna is afraid of is our cat Fred. He has his own technique for keeping warm.

Although we received gusts of wind over 100 Km/hr, waves did not quite reach our seawall. In other years during other storms waves have crashed right up against our seawall, even throwing logs over. As bad as the storms of November and December 2006 have been, I’ve seen a lot worse. I lived through the Ice Storm of 1998. We never lost power much where I lived in Ottawa but I knew others who had to live in a school gymnasium for a week or more. People were sent home from work and a state of emergency was declared and the army was called in. Now that was big storm.

Deep Bay has also had bigger storms in the twenty five or so years we’ve had a house here. I remember one washing out the road and blowing our rowboat down the spit breaking it on some rocks. We still have that rowboat, my grandfather fixed it, my dad had it when he was younger. We now keep it in our shack during the winter.

Update: February 2017 brought another surprisingly big storm and over 45 cms of snow to Deep Bay British Columbia. We lost power last night, but generally #Snowmageddon2017 has not been as chaotic as this or previous storms I’ve blogged about. Right now we have power, cable TV, even Internet access so I am updating my blog before I do some studying and assuming we don’t lose power, baking.

This entry was originaly posted on December 21st, 2006, it was last edited on April 21st, 2024 and is filed under: Rambles and tagged: Deep Bay, Nanaimo, Photos.