It didn't take long for the power to go out in Chesapeake City. I lost power at my house at 12:30 pm on Thursday, and didn't get it back until 6:30 pm on Saturday. That's 54 hours without electricity! Fortunately, I borrowed a generator from the Marina, and Bryan and I hard-wired it into my breaker box before the power went out, and it helped tremendously by making sure the refrigerator stayed running and most of the lights in the house worked.

Here's the generator itself sitting on my back porch. I put the 30 amp plug on the end of some wire I had in the garage, and plugged it into the generator.

Then I drilled a hole in the wall of the garage, and ran the wire through the hole so I could get to the breaker box. (The other two wires coming through are for the hot tub.)

Here the wire comes up into the bottom of the breaker box, and is hooked to the 30 amp breaker on the bottom left. All I had to do was shut off all the breakers (especially the main), fire up the generator, turn on the new breaker for the generator, and then turn on the breakers for whatever circuits I wanted to get power, trying not to exceed 30 amps. It worked great!

Since everything in Chesapeake City was closed, there wasn't much to do but sit home in my self-powered house and wait out the storm. The next morning, it was a beautiful, sunny, calm day. But still no power. I took a ride out on the local roads to see how they had held up, and here's what I found:

Court House Point Road has a large tree near Short Cut Road. Parts of it were falling over.

I'm glad this part of the tree didn't decide to fall in the other direction.

Here you can see the power lines getting tangled.

This is the reason I didn't have power for 54 hours.

Here's a tree leaning over the road. I was glad it didn't fall the rest of the way onto my truck while I took this picture.

Here the road had been impassable, but someone was kind enough to clear the trees out..

Here's some more branches in the road.

This is the community beach in my neighborhood. Not much of a beach there that morning.

This tree had fallen next to Town Point Road. It doesn't appear to have done any damage, but it's a big tree!

This tree obviously took out some power lines.

Here's a spot on Town Point Road that was barely passable. Good thing we had the Hummer!

Here again you can see where the road was partially blocked.

And another spot where the traffic could only be one-way.

Head back to the main Isabel page to see what else I found!

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