THE "P's" STILL HAVE IT

P is for Power.  Or the lack of it.  What will we do in Panama when there are outages here and there, and there isn’t the service there like there is here?  Patience, another “P”. 

Last night we had the warning of a storm coming from the west.  The wind started in Illinois about twelve hours before getting to our lake house in Bumpass, Virginia.  Ray thought it was raining and hard!  There wasn’t any rain (I could barely hear it as usual) when he looked outside but just a howling wind.  A constant wind.  Eerie and scary.  Then the lights flickered on and off, the tv went off and on.  We had just finished a few of the IL seminars on the computer.  The internet went out.  At 10:30pm, the electricity went out.  I was immediately hot and sweaty.  We called it a night and went to bed to watch the crazy lightning from bed.   In our cove that we have here at Lake Anna, we can walk across it to get to our neighbors dock.  Their house is “across the water up on a hill”.  We saw a fire engine and what looked like an ambulance pull up in front of their house.  Ray went onto the screened-in porch to listen to the rain and wind (we finally got the rain and heavy downpours).  He heard a thunderous explosion and today realizes it was a roof falling onto another house “across the water”.  Lightning had struck the roof of the, mostly brick, three story home.  The owner’s live in this house year round.  We walked down to the water and looked up the hill with the house engulfed in flames.  The owners tried putting a small fire out in their kitchen with a fire extinguisher.  Then realized more of the house was on fire, so they grabbed their pets and themselves, jumped in the car and tried getting the fire department on the phone.  They had to then drive three miles to the nearest fire station to tell them about the fire.  In the meantime, neighbors were calling the fire in and getting through the lines finally.  They were telling the fireman “just to get to this road and you will see the fire”!  They had to truck water in.  They set pools up to pump the water out.  The lake isn’t close enough to pump water out of it.  The second story porch collapsed on a fireman (he had to be dug out by a neighbor that had a forklift on his tractor).  He was alert, conscious and airlifted to the hospital.  The house was down in thirty minutes.  The owners have nothing. 

The house on the right (on the hill) is the one right across the cove from our house.  It is where we watched the fire destroy their neighbors house.  

P is for Prayers.  And lots of them for my neighbors and also all the people in Colorado fighting those fires.  This is "just" one house that I saw burn down to the ground in less than thirty minutes.  I cannot imagine the forest fires out west.
Back to Power.  We didn't have electricity for nine hours, and I was "dying".  I was anxious.  Just not knowing what my house in Stafford was looking like (neighbors will call me if there is trouble ever) or if there was electricity.  The yard at this house was in shambles with scattered limbs and debris.  The gutters were a mess.  The other owners of this house aren't here, so Ray and I spent the hot and humid morning walking the neighborhood surveying the damage in our yard as well as other yards on other streets.  Then we had to clean up.

Lake Anna Nuclear Power Plant.  Lake Anna was created in the 1970's to provide a reservoir of water coolant for the power plant.  Too bad we can't keep power up and running during the bad storms.

P is for Patience.  I tell myself this everyday now.