Ice Storm 2009

[Kaotix]

Currently at 8 days without power. I've been sleeping on couches, spare beds, and as of yesterday in a hotel room.

I haven't yet reverted to cannibalism, but I am still alive. I haven't slept in my own home since this started and I really want to be in my own bed soon.

I'm posting this from work.

[darkwingdork]

Glad to hear from you Kaotix! Sorry you're without power, I remember what that was like during Hurricane Ike. Can't imagine what's worse: being in cold weather without energy, or hot weather.

Hope things are restored for you soon!

[Kaotix]

Day 14. No power yet.

*sob*

[darkwingdork]

You need to call up Barack Obama and tell him you need some environmental justice.

The weather's always trying to keep the dragons down!

Sorry to hear it, Kaotix. Do you live in a low-priority area? Not near any hospitals, fire stations, schools, etc.?

[Kaotix]

Nah, all of the important places are up and running. It was just that big of a mess. The ice storm took down nearly everything. It was like the Fourth of July the night of the storm. You could see bright blue flashes all over the place as transformers popped and power lines were snapped. Everything was coated in ice an inch thick.

The power crews are having to get rid of downed trees/huge limbs just to get at the power lines and it's slow going especially for the ones who are a bit further out from city center.

They've been the road that leads to my place, but they have a lot to repair and a lot to clean up before they get down as far as I am.

[darkwingdork]

I know what it was like. When Ike came through her last summer, the city was decimated. 90% were without power. Two weeks later, 50% of the city was still without. It took about month before things completely returned to normal.

Even when you got your power back, there was no guarantee that grccery stores, restaurants, etc. would be open.

Galveston STILL is a mess. In fact, a lot of Galvestonians were complaining that the media was deliberately avoiding reporting the problems there, unlike New Orleans which got round-the-clock coverage for months. The death toll was nowhere near as high as Louisiana, of course, but the city looked just as decimated.

[darkwingdork]

How goes the great Appalachian freeze-out, Kaotix?

[Kaotix]

16 days no power. And I now have shingles ripped from my roof due to high winds that came with the thunderstorms on Tuesday adn Wednesday.

*sigh*

[darkwingdork]

I responded over on the Jack forum, but I have something to add over here.

The problem is, and I can say this from experience, is that during a major power outage, the worst situation to be in is to have some easy-to-fix (but time-consuming) problem in a small neighborhood.

The power company is first going to focus on "priority" locations, which are neighborhoods near hospitals, schools, police stations and other places that provide emergency or social services. After that, they're going to concentrate on restoring power to places that had major damage that knocked out energy to thousands of people. The rest of the neighborhoods will be serviced as the recovery period winds down.

It comes down to this: the electric company is basically running a PR campaign during the recovery period. They want to turn on the most amount of homes as soon as possible so that during the evening news, they can claim "Look! We restored power to 10,000 residences today!"

When it comes down either spending 10 hours rebuilding an electric tower that services 10,000 people in a highly populated area, or spending the same amount of time going from transformer to transformer through different neighborhoods to ultimately restore power to just 2,000 people, guess what's going to happen first?

Once the majority of the city has received its power, and MOST people and businesses have returned to normalcy, the power company will quietly restore power to the remaining 5-10% of the population, knowing that by that point, most of the population will have moved on an forgotten the power outage and won't be moved to sympathy to those who had to wait twice as long.

"What? Power outage? Didn't we already fix that? Why are you still talking about that, I've had my power on for more than a week now!"

[Kaotix]

Got power last Thursday. It's been nice sleeping in my own house again the past few nights.

[darkwingdork]

Glad to hear it. How is the ol' lair? Still got your hoard of gold and kidnapped princess? (Or is that your summer lair?)

[Kaotix]

All gold and tied up maidens accounted for. This was one of the few times they were allowed to wear more than leather underwear. XD

[darkwingdork]

Check to make sure they didn't burn any of your horde to stay warm.