Dear Journal,
It started as a regular day. As an off duty CMP crew member, I was sitting on the couch eating pretzels with my daughter. It was 3:30 in the afternoon when I got a call from work saying I needed to come in. I hadn't seen the news yet and when I walked outside I couldn't believe it. We had an ice storm in progress. I was driving to work when I saw a lot of fallen trees in the woods and branches on the road. When I got to work everyone was scrambling to get where they needed to go.
Dear Journal,
Day 2 of the ice storm wasn't any better, we had to get supplies the day before, and it wasn't easy.
We were under staffed, we needed even more supplies, and we had to be at five different places at once. There were more and more power failures. The falling icy branches become more of a problem then when it first started, and it seemed there was no end to my work.
Dear journal,
On Day 3 it felt like I needed to work faster so I could get the job done before the next outage. There was never an end to any of it. My wife was not having any better of a time. We had just moved into a hotel to help the people living there get through the storm. My wife was always tired and never slept. She was scared that something was going to happen to me. The same was true of my daughter. It was hard to keep warm with the power always going on and off. If the power was out then I would have to go get wood, and it was frozen so we had to wait until it melted in order to burn it.
Dear Journal,
On Day 4 500,000 people from all over the United States came to help. We were without power and it also didn't look any better. We had over 200 electrical crews come to help, and 11,000 Canadian troops came to help. We had faulty transmission lines so when we fixed power in one place we lost power in another. When it wasn't the transmission lines, it would be the trees falling on the electrical lines which cause more and more outages.
Dear Journal,
On Day 5, some crewmen from Bell Atlantic had to go to the hospital to treat their family for carbon monoxide poisoning. There were an estimated 600 telephone poles down in central Maine. It got harder and harder to get work done. I heard that CMP was spending over 20 million dollars in cleanup. I couldn't believe that the company I worked for could spend so much on the ice storm. The Salvation Army was feeding me, I was grateful that I got to have food in such a time of need.
Dear Journal,
Day 6, I was tired and felt overworked. I was cold and my back hurt. We had been working nonstop. I heard that 12-15 generators had been from Bell Atlantic. I also heard that you shouldn't put your generator in your front yard because it musn't tempt others to steal it. When I was out today people kept putting out signs for people to come and help them and one said,
“roses are red,
violets are blue,
CMP,
we need you”
I felt bad because I wanted to help them but it seemed the more I helped, the more things went wrong.
Dear Journal,
On Day 7, I was almost taken out by a falling branch. When I was separating branches to get to the power lines, one came loose and almost hit me. My controller Jeff asked, "What the heck was that?" and I told him a branch almost hit me. I came back to the hotel and told my wife what had happened that day, and she couldn't take it. She said that we were leaving the next morning.
Dear Journal,
On Day 8, when we got up in the morning, my wife started packing her clothes with my daughter. After she was done, she told me, “Honey we're ready." I said, “Honey go back to the house. I'm staying here and I'm going to finish what I've started”. She said she understood, and to make sure to call often, and that she loved me. That morning as I was getting ready for work I wondered if I did the right thing, but now after all of it, I know I did.
Written by Dylan Thiboutot