Since the Frankenstorm, I've had an interesting few days.
I thought we did pretty well, just seeing a lot of rain and wind on Monday night. But Tuesday morning, I took a walk and discovered a big branch had fallen on some neighbor's cars, just missing my son's car by 20 feet and mine by 40 feet. I breathed a sigh of relief and thought we had survived without a scrape.
Then, around 1:30 we lost power. I took off, ran an errand, then started looking for a coffee shop wit WIFI, to do some more work. There were not nearby. I had to drive through several towns, at least 10 miles, to find one, and it was packed. That night, there was no power, ends up there were 850,000 homes without power-- a record for PECO. Fortunately, I had a supply of flashlights and we have gas cooking and hot water. But it got cold that night.
Next day, I hit a restaurant with a table with a working wall socket, and found that the pizza parlor next door had WIFI I could use. But it was very spotty. I went to a Barnes and Noble I go to occasionally. It had been closed the day before. But yesterday, it was packed. I got a table, but no juice, and the WIFI was again, ver iffy. But people were kind. We were all in the same boat. One guy was smart enoughh to bring a power strip. A bunch of us all shared it. It felt like a modern watering hole.
I met one guy looking for hotels and they were all sold out. I spoke to a woman who was staying at a hotel with her husband, two teens and mother-in-law-- so they could charge up and shower. She said she'd found the hotel on line. It was the second one. The first had been out of electricity and she had to cancel.
Around 2:30 PM, before I got around to sending out the daily newsletter, I got a message that OPEDNEWS's server was saying we were out of bandwidth. A lot of people got that message. I checked. Ends up, we weren't out of bandwidth. Across the web, a new control panel had been added to millions of websites, and it caused the settings to be wrong-- apparently. We got them re-set and OEN was back up and running.
Meanwhile, my neck and back were killing me, making me cranky, sitting in chairs designed to motivate people to leave after 20 minutes. I went home, called the electric company again, and they'd revised their estimate of when power would be restored-- to two days further.
So, I hit the gym, hoping to get a workout, then squeeze into the hot tub there-- figuring it would probably be packed with all the out of power people thinking like me. While I was there, a friend suggested I stay at my daughter's house. So, that's where I am and expect to be for at least another day.
Today, I woke up in a warm house not worried if my phone and computer were charged. I had breakfast with my son and daughter... life is not back to normal, but it's good.
I'm not complaining. Life goes on. People an hour away from me in NJ have been much harder hit, as have all those people in NYC.
Now, the electric company says power will be restored at 11 PM tomorrow. I'm not holding my breath.
One thought. Seeing all the water in the cities at the Jersey Shore and in NYC, it made me realize. Climate change is not going to make cities uninhabitable by waters rising gradually on sunny days. They will, long before then, make them inhabitable because storms will cause flooding that eventually becomes too expensive to keep cleaning up. By the time the seas actually flow into the city streets, the cities affected by rising seas AND wild weather caused by climate change will have long been abandoned.
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