Have you ever seen this?

I am guessing that there's something here you haven't seen before.

An ice storm happens when there is cold air at the surface of the earth and warm air up in the clouds.  The rain comes down and freezes to everything.

 

These pictures were taken first thing in the morning on Thursday.  It continued to rain for another 6 hours after this.  Everything got heavy and broke.

Eventually these needles were one solid block of ice.  Not as cool as seeing each one in an individual shaft of ice.

How do you open this?

 
Here's a close up.  By the time dad got around to deicing his car, it was 3/4" thick (not pictured).

 Check out how thick the ice was. 

Guess what this is.

 

See the web?

The ice is as big as pearls on a necklace.  That is one strong web.  Originally there were two, but dad grabbed one trying to figure out what it was.

Here he is trying to kill himself.  It is still raining when this was taken.  We call that Wackadoodle!  The ice weighed down the branches and caused them to explode like fire crackers.  Imagine tying a bag of ice to every little branch.  When the top broke it took out two other branches on the way down.

The ice caused the tops to pop off of the trees.  These came from 60' up in the air and some stabbed into the ground several inches. 

This is a 12" diameter tree that broke off and landed in the neighbors yard.  There is a branch in the foreground that makes it look smaller.  It hit the ground first and then fell back into the fence. Amazingly it only killed a few bushes in the yard.

It takes a lot of weight to do this.

 This one is just "Awesome"!

Dad has more than 20 pictures of different trees in the neighborhood that all look like this.  Here are just a few.

The entire neighborhood was planted with gorgeous flowering plumbs.  They look amazing in the Spring.  At least they used to.  Virtually everyone of them had major breaks.  Many are going to be a complete loss.