Have you ever wondered what 3 inches of ice on a twig looks like?

My pastor’s wife took this picture.  You can see just how thick the ice was.

I tried to describe the intensity of our winter storm in my last post.  No one around here, including the old-timers, have ever seen an ice storm that caused so much damage.  I still haven’t seen an official precipitation total, but the guys in our utility crews think we received between 2 and 3 inches of ice (freezing rain), which accumulated mainly on limbs and power lines.

On the evening news a few days ago, a reporter from one of our local TV stations picked up a small ice covered branch and weighed it—it was 20 pounds.  Then she knocked off all the ice and weighed it again—this time it was only 3 pounds.  The ice covered branch was almost 7 times its normal weight.

And from what I could tell, there wasn’t as much ice on the branch she used in her demonstration as there was on the trees in our yard.  Speaking of which, my daughter took a picture of the once stately 50-ft. oak tree towering over our front yard.

It doesn’t look so stately there.  It was strange hearing those giant limbs crack like shotgun blasts through the afternoon and evening.  Although the tree was badly damaged, my house escaped.  My father-in-law wasn’t so fortunate.  He has several large trees in his back yard.  During the storm, an ice-laden branch broke and fell from one of them, pierced the steel roofing on his house, continued through the attic, stabbed the ceiling, and protruded about a foot into his bathroom.

Word from the AP this afternoon is that there are still about 22,000 homes and businesses in southern Missouri without power.  Many of those are in and around Sikeston.  My pastor and my oldest son are among them.  One more post (perhaps) about the storm, and that will be it.