As late as Sunday morning, more than 700,000 people in Kentucky alone are still without power, nearly a week after an ice storm ravaged the state. The damage was visited on other states as well, but Kentucky was the hardest hit.
On Saturday, Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear deployed every National Guardsman in the state. There were roughly a dozen deaths in the state, mainly from carbon monoxide poisoning. (One man had been burning a charcoal grill inside his apartment.) Officials asked Kentuckians to leave their homes, but, being Kentuckians, many stayed put. “Too many people are trying to tough it out at home,” Lt. Gov. Daniel Mongiardo said.
As utility companies considered employing tanks to reach their most isolated customers, some Kentucky officials were asking their people to leave the state — to pack up and move to some other place where there was power, food and warm shelter.
Click to the next page to hear what the ice storm sounded like in Western Kentucky — the tinkling of falling ice and the crack of falling trees. And there you can find the links to other work by photographers in the slideshow above.
Circulating, one of the photographers in the slideshow, lives in Western Kentucky. She recorded the sound of the ice storm, and wrote: “B and I stood at his open garage door on Tuesday evening as the ice storm raged around us… all power was out so there is nothing much to see here except a few beams shone from his flashlight…the sounds of the raining ice and the crashing trees however was pretty scary…I cried a little and we held hands and prayed.”
Here are links to other work by the photographers in the slideshow:
Allen Bush writes about the ice storm at the HumanFlowerProject.
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