Cathy Obenour is a strong, gutsy 74-year-old granny who doesn't let much faze her. But after nearly five days without electricity on the Washington County sheep farm where she and her 81-year-old husband, Jack, are snowed in, she's had enough.
At one point an emergency management official offered to move the Obenours into a shelter. She turned him down flat.
"Who would take care of the animals?" she asked.
The power went out Friday around 9 p.m., but she didn't call Allegheny Power until Sunday, when the wood for the fireplace was running low, as was the gas for their other fireplace. The temperature in the house fell to 38 degrees.
"They said maybe by this Friday," she sighed.
"I'm not complaining. It's better to take care of 100 people than to worry about one. But this is getting ridiculous. If they took care of maintenance in the summer, it wouldn't be like this. There are broken trees on the lines everywhere."
They got a generator going Tuesday. It runs only their water-based heating system, so their pipes won't freeze. Before that they took turns sleeping by the fireplace, and burned through two cords of wood from the 90-acre farm in Mount Pleasant.
Through it all the 5-foot-2-inch grandmother has hiked up and down hills in snow up to her thighs, carrying heavy buckets of water and feed. The hen house shelters Rhode Island Reds, including the rooster that their grandson raised to win the prize for grand champion at the Washington County fair.
"Is it cold in here? Do you have any eggs for me?" she called to them. "Oh, your water is frozen." The chickens clucked as she replenished their water from her pail.
Then it was a slippery downhill trudge to the car barn, where she filled a bucket with about 40 pounds of feed for the 50 Dorsett sheep. They were waiting by the fence where she normally feeds them, but she called them into their barn so the food wouldn't be lost in the snow. She had made makeshift troughs from plastic sleds and pushed another feeder beneath a large manger so the lambs could feed without being pushed aside.
She took a shortcut over an electric fence that had lost its zing to reach a hay shed. She tossed four 45-pound bales of hay back over the fence and then carried them into the barn. She had baled the hay herself.
She was raised on a nearby farm where her father, a Croatian immigrant from what is now Bosnia, raised dairy cattle. They didn't have electricity until the 1940s, so when the blizzard of 1950 knocked it out, "we knew how to make do," she said. She met Jack, a Moon Run native and Navy veteran, at a polka dance. They married in 1961.
He would spend a 42-year career in electrical maintenance for Duquesne Light. She worked as an executive secretary at U.S. Steel early in their marriage, but farming was in her soul. So as they approached marriage, they bought what was then an abandoned farm at public auction and set about restoring the collapsing 1842 farmhouse.
Hard work is normal for them, so they took the first two days of the power outage in stride. A gas well on their property gave them a limited supply for their cook-top and a gas fireplace in the dining room. But when paying customers put a heavy drain in their well, the gas fireplace went out at about the same time they ran low on wood for the other fireplace. That was when she called Allegheny Power.
They had a generator in their car barn, but their tractor lacked four-wheel drive and couldn't haul it up to the house. After several failed attempts to move it, their daughter arrived Tuesday with a male friend and manually hauled it up on a sled. Then the wind blew the plug out of its socket in the middle of the night. Mr. Obenour waded outside at a bitterly cold 4 a.m. to find and fix the problem.
The electric pump that supplies spring water to their house is also out, but they have carried water up from a raised spring-fed concrete pool in the sheep pasture. A neighbor cleared their driveway.
When the freezer burst open from bread dough that had thawed, Mrs. Obenour baked bread and cinnamon buns on the gas grill on her back porch. The ice cream and vegetables are now stored on that porch.
"A lot of people are probably a lot worse off," Mr. Obenour said. "It takes time for them to get to everyone."
First Published: February 11, 2010, 10:00 a.m.
