It seems kinda silly now looking back on the post “10 December 2023: Bracing for a Big Storm” and all the concerns we had at that time about potential wind and rain damage after the absolute pounding the State of Maine took on Monday. On Monday they reportedly clocked winds at Pemaquid Point of 105 mph. That’s humming! The wind wasn’t that high here inland, but the wind was still terrifying and plenty strong enough to knock down trees the telephone poles (see above). You’ve no doubt seen the pictures of the Kennebec River overflowing it’s banks and flooding downtown Gardiner, Hallowell, and Augusta and other pictures and videos from around the State showing roads washed out or blocked with down trees and powerlines. We and most everyone else in Midcoast Maine lost power about 8 AM on Monday the 18th and for us here on the south side of Clary Lake, it didn’t return until about 3 PM Thursday afternoon thanks to the broken off pole (pictured above) just into Jefferson on Route 126 which delayed restoration efforts. At the time of this writing on Friday morning there are still 31,000 CMP customers without power, down from a half a million just a couple of days ago.

Much of the State received huge volumes of rain but here on Clary Lake we only received a bit over 2″ of rain but that was enough, on top of the 3+ inches we received the week before, to raise the lake level to just above the HWM (picture at left). We try to keep the lake level down where it belongs this time of year, around -18 inches but we’ve received over 5 inches of rain in the last week and that’s enough to over top the dam pretty much any time of year. I spent much of the week tending my and my sister’s generators and standing in line at the Whitefield Market to buy gas. All I can say is I’m glad all that rain wasn’t snow.

I thought that Clary_cam3 had died earlier this week. It stopped working right around the time of the big storm but I didn’t get a chance till this morning to go look at it, I discovered that a squirrel had chewed on the tip of the plastic antenna just enough to allow water to get into it. This ruined the antenna and prevented the camera from wirelessly uploading pictures to the website. Fortunately, I’ve got spare antennas and I swapped in a good one. This is not the first time this has happened (see 01 April 2021: Trouble With Squirrels). Smearing petroleum jelly on the antennas seems to prevent this problem. I guess I need to smear it on more often.

And it isn’t over. My life has returned to something like normal, but for thousands of other people the ordeal continues.