It has been a month since Ice Storm Fern.
We watched trees bend under the weight of accumulated ice beginning Jan. 23 and we listened to limbs crack, checked power outage maps and waited for updates from utility crews well beyond the official end of the storm on Jan. 27.
The aftermath is still with us.
Drive almost any highway in the parish and you can see it. Piles of tree branches still line the shoulders and utility trucks are parked along the right-of-way. Crews are still trimming back limbs from power lines. The work is slow, methodical and necessary.
The headlines moved on weeks ago. The cleanup did not.
During those first few days, televisions and radios blasted doom and gloom nonstop. People scrolled their phones for the latest updates about tomorrow’s weather, what roads were open and closed, which schools were still open. Keeping updated was a matter of life and death.
The recovery is less dramatic. It is men with chainsaws and bucket trucks. It is property owners dragging limbs to the ditch one armful at a time. It is insurance forms and repair estimates. It’s boring and it’s hard work and nobody is updating you on it every half hour. Those trucks hauling limbs and cleaning up the mess don’t make good clickbait.
If anything, we feel a little impatient. We live in an era of instant updates and immediate answers. When something breaks, we want it fixed now. When a storm passes, we want the evidence gone.
Nature doesn’t care. The branches along the highway are not signs of neglect. They are signs of scale. Thousands of trees across hundreds of miles do not right themselves overnight. It takes planning, manpower and time.
It also takes patience. There is something humbling about driving past those lingering reminders. They tell us events have consequences that stretch beyond the moment. They remind us even after the ice melts, the effects remain.
At the same time, the continued presence of crews along the roadside is a quieter story. The people still trimming limbs this week are finishing work that began in freezing temperatures. They are preventing future outages by removing hazards that could fall in the next storm.
Fern was a reminder we live in a place where weather matters. Nearly a month later, the limbs along the roadside are still there. So are the crews working to clear them. Emergencies come and go, but the work is always there.
It may not be news, but it should be appreciated and so should all the people working behind the scenes to make it happen.
Darryl Riser is editor of the Richland Beacon-News.
