319 MaquÉden, We didn’t expect THIS when we got home, France storm Nils damage, No power, No water!

Описание: Hello here we are again if you like to know about dramatic storms that put 850.000 people, us included, out of power. Not a problem if you are at home, but we were 1300km away!

So we were thinking, let's go to the Netherlands for 12 days. We were visiting family until Tuesday, February 10 — day five — when we saw on the news that storm Nils had chosen southern France as its personal playground. The sitter sent some worrying photos. Not long after that, we got a push notification from the home: power outage. And that’s not a small detail here — no electricity also means no water pumps → no drinking water for the horses. So the sitter drove back and forth with jerrycans as if she were participating in an obscure reality show: France’s Got Buckets. On top of that, the neighbor reported something was wrong with an electricity pole.

So we went into panic mode: packed up and rushed back. The last 30 km to home were… special. Detours everywhere because of flooding, poorly indicated and pitch dark because of the power breakdown. There’s very little street lighting here anyway (great for light pollution — but now perhaps a bit too effective).
The “déviation” signs were also an art project in themselves: yellow arrows with the text taped over. Apparently they needed so many signs that the texts no longer matched, so they just covered everything and hoped everyone would telepathically sense the right direction. So we missed several turns. Naturally. Home at 1 a.m. Sleep for a bit.

After breakfast: damage inspection. And honestly, we got off lightly.

Lots of electric fence tape broken or loose, but repairable
Branches everywhere
The centuries-old oak is still standing (🙏)
The animals are fine — cats ecstatic, horses stoic but happy with a midnight carrot

The absolute showstopper: the green hay feeder. It was lying 50 meters away. Normally it’s barely liftable with two people — so Nils simply gave it flying lessons.

The most spectacular drama happened at the neighbors’: an electricity pole toppled due to a small landslide, and the road shifted about a meter and a half. That broke the water pipe → neighbours had no water, we had no pressure.
And then the water company showed up. They decided not to look at the fresh landslide (logical thinking is overrated), but to plow up our pasture and track searching for the leak. With excavators. Mounds of clay a meter high. Trenches and more trenches. Only when we pointed it out, did they look where everyone already thought the problem was. Exactly. There by the landslide. Not in our field.

So in the end, the biggest damage wasn’t the storm — but the unnecessary destructive digging. We were clearly on the edge of the storm; at its peak about 850,000 households in France were without power. Damage mainly consisted of uprooted trees, flooded roads, broken power lines and infrastructure problems. Traffic, flights and trains were disrupted, and roads were closed by fallen trees. So yes — compared to that, we were dealing only with a flying hay feeder and an agricultural art installation, courtesy of the excavator crew.

Conclusion: we were clearly on the edge of Nils — lots of work, little real damage. And secretly still impressive how much force it takes to move a hay feeder as if it were a plastic garden chair, which by the way also flew away. But anyway: everything is still alive! xx MoEr

#StormNils #ExtremeWeather #PowerOutage #FarmLife #HorseLife #RuralLiving #StormDamage #StormFrance #TempêteNils
#HayFeederFlight #NoElectricity #RealLifeVlog #WeatherStory #LifeInFrance #AdventureAtHome