I'm a neighbor to your west in NE Arkansas, and we got hammered! I live in Jonesboro, which is where the Weather Channel happened to be hanging out for a couple of days.
While our community is 100% back online as far as I know, we're still having problems due to trees continuing to fall, but those are mostly caused by everyone trying to clear the damage and not paying attention and doing it right.
There are outlying communities around here that have been told to not expect power for at least another month.
We personally lost power for 3 days, but since I own and operate a reefkeeping business and have roughly 1400g of saltwater in my home, even 12 hours was critical for us... We scrounged up as many propane cylinders, computer bateries, car batteries and voltage inverters as we could, just to try to keep the water temps up as high as possible... Ultimately I had 2 acuaculture systems drop to 51*, my Shark tank dropped to 58*, and my $20,000+ coral display system never fell below 71*. My total livestock losses are +/- $700, which is nothing at all in the grand scheme of things.
I too was finally able to locate a generator on our 3rd day without power, but as soon as I got it home ad unpacked, our power was restored. I went ahead and fueled it up anyway to have at the ready, then ended up loaning it to a friend that lives in one of the communities I mentioned above.
As bad as this storm has been, I could have been far worse when you stop to consider how many people (myself included) were having to heat portions of their homes with propane or kerosene heaters, without proper ventilation. A good friend of mine is a ER Nurse, and he says that while they had a lot of people arriving with Carbon Monoxide poisoning, he saw no recorded fatalities in the area.
-Tim
