September 2013 Storm

January 14, 2014, 8:16 pm
Filed under: Uncategorized

Back in September Paula was preparing for her final Vet Nursing exam, and to give her some peace and quiet I decided to take the kids on a road trip to visit their cousins in Wellington. Unfortunately she didn’t get much peace and quiet due to the strongest winds to hit Canterbury in the last 30 years. They hit in the night, and the first phone call I got in the morning was that it had been very noisy, a chair had blown over, the bbq cover came off and all of the blossom had blown off the fruit trees. I suggested that she went for a walk outside, and the next phone call was a bit more dramatic, multiple big trees down, road to the houses down the back completely blocked due to our gum trees being across it, and the big wattle tree at the front of our place was down and had brought power lines down blocking our driveway. The power was off, and remained off for 7 days.

We were very grateful for the help of friends and neighbours for the loan of generators, gas cookers, big chainsaws and washing machines.
We had a few great HelpXers come to stay with us after the storm and thanks to them we are almost finished chopping up firewood, I estimate we have about 3 winters worth stacked up and drying. It was pretty satisfying using the big chipper!