No power until mid-February

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090129/ap_ ... nter_storm



My gawd! WTF is wrong with out damn country??? I thought by the 21st century we had the technology to get the power back on in a matter of days year-round, from the city to the sticks.....

I was aghast at that too, and still am. It's completely crazy.

And the problem with the wait that makes it unacceptable has nothing to do with our "convenience-oriented culture",
but rather with that immediate fact that these people probably don't have knowledge of dead-of-winter-no-electricity-for-weeks survival skills. So that makes this half-month delay a full emergency. People nowadays NEED electricity to survive. I just read about that old man who recently died in his home needlessly, simply because of the combination of cold weather and no electricity. Same goes for the extreme heat in summertime; in France, several older people died in their homes due to simple lack of air conditioning during a relatively-recent European heat wave. My gosh -- after food, what on Earth merits government action/spending more than basic heating and A/C so that their taxpayers can stay alive??

Last edited by Ragtime on 29 Jan 2009, 1:00 pm, edited 5 times in total.

Easily accomplished when only 1500 homes are affected. Not so easy when 1000 times that many are without power.

There are going to be a LOT of babies born in October and November, this year ...

This is true, this is true...

Anyone remember the heat wave in Chicago in 1995?

You live in Western Kentucky right. I used to live @ Fort Campbell which is near Paduach and they just got a bad ic storm. Imagine 3"+ of icing during an Ice Storm.

Yes, I was 5 @ the time and a lot of people died due to it. Tempatures where in the mid-80's overnight and people where being rushed to the emergency rooms. Also college students in northwest chicago gone as far as sleep with blankets soaked in cold water.

Blizzards are hard to deal with. Sorry guys, no matter how rich America is, we haven't mastered nature yet.

The trouble with the damned country is that most of our power lines are above ground. Getting the lines put back up is a labor intesive, not a capital intensive operation. Ice is the enemy of above ground power and telephone lines.

Having an auxillary generator that can keep the lights on and the fridge cold for a limited period of time would be a partial solution.

ruveyn

I doubt that many of those people will not have to worry much about keeping the fridge cold!

My old high school (in SW Ohio, not far from Kentucky) just got its fourth snow day in a row- that *never* happens. This is a pretty nasty bit of snow we're talking about here.

I had noticed that in the TV footage of tropical storms and the like. Here in Canada its pretty much under ground power and other services.

What really got me about the storms was that they just put new lines up. Dont they learn? I remember an interview with one of the workers and he said it was the third time in as many years that they had to replace the lines. But nobody, including him, said squat about burying the damn things.

We're cheapskates and we like quick fixes.