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+--- Thread: Electricity is nice (/showthread.php?tid=7084)
Electricity is nice - A Black Falcon - 5th November 2017
... Is, for me at least, kind of the understatement of the year. So, early last Monday morning there was a strong wind and rain storm here in Maine, and between the up-to-70mph winds and its unusual wind direction (coming from the south, not the north) it knocked out power to almost half of electricity customers in the state -- 480,000 customers lost power. I'm not sure if the national news noticed, but it was a pretty big deal. Where I live now usually has quite reliable power, but sadly a huge tree branch took out the line going from the pole to the house, so we lost power as well. The huge branch and downed line were cleaned up by later Monday, but that's where it stopped for quite some time.
Now, the local power company, CMP, prioritized things by focusing first on line outages that would get a lot of customers their power back, then slowly working their way down from that. So, we were pretty low priority, so I didn't get power back all the way until this morning. They said they were trying to get everyone back up by Saturday night, but missed that goal. I just got power back this morning, and it sounds like a lot of other people only got it back today as well. This is a huge relief, because this has been a pretty awful week due to not having power. Some of that of course is because most of what I like doing (except from reading books) requires power, but also my hot water and stove are electric so they didn't work, and the furnace needs electricity to turn on so it didn't work either. I do have some gas heaters in some areas (and electric, not that they're useful here), and since those have pilots they worked thankfully, but the furnace is essential.
Now, Maine had one previous storm like this, the great Ice Storm of '98. That storm in January 1998 knocked out power to a lot of people, including us. We lost power for longer then; it was at least a week and a half, where I lived then. Conditions in general were a lot worse because of ice and temperatures, though; this time few people were forced out of their houses because of cold, 6-plus days in moderate above-freezing temperatures is not enough to do that. That's a huge thing, because in '98, while we were able to stay in our house because the house had a woodstove as well as the (not-operational-without-power) furnace, a lot of neighbors had to move out if their only heating system was a furnace. I remember it being kind of boring, with no power or school (since the schools were shelters for people who had to leave their homes) for several weeks, but no similar power-outage event had happened again here, until now.
This outage was similar in many ways to the one from '98, but different of course -- there were more outages (in my hometown for instance, the downtown and mall areas never lost power in the '98 storm, but this time lost power for days...), warmer temperatures, a faster recovery, and such. So really this wasn't as bad as '98, despite more people losing power -- CMP does seem to have learned from the previous storm. Still though, I really disliked this experience (and worried a lot, of course, since that's what I do). Sure, I love reading and did a good amount of that and still could use handhelds (if you find a way to charge them for newer ones that don't just use batteries), but electricity, the internet, and modern life are so closely entwined that it is jarring to suddenly be without those things.
So yeah, while we had it really bad here this last week, thanks to lots of work from line crews from all over the Northeast and Atlantic Canada, power is back on in most places at last. I feel for all those people in Puerto Rico who have been without power for over a month now! Sure, they don't need to worry about literally being frozen out of their homes given the climate there, but otherwise it's an incredibly unacceptable thing to allow a part of America to have no power for that long. The place needs a massive response that our racist president obviously has no interest in giving. Sad stuff... but anyway yes, I'm back!
Electricity is nice - Dark Jaguar - 6th November 2017
We had a storm earlier this year that knocked out power for 3 days. Not fun, since I had to find a way to preserve my food in the mean time.