October Nor'easter

October 29-November 2, 2011 — It was a feeling of deja vu. In February 2010 a windstorm so devastated the city it took out power for 68 hours. That was the first time in my nearly 50 years in this city that power was lost for more than an hour or two. I thought the odds were against ever seeing a prolonged outage like that again. But lo and behold, it happened again this past week. A record foot and a half of heavy wet snow falling on trees with all their leaves took down limbs and wires and cut off power for 84 hours.

Unlike the February 2010 outage which occurred during an unseasonably warm spell, this most recent outage happened while temperatures were well below average for late October. It was going down in the 20s overnight and barely reaching 50 in the daytime. Temperature in the house was falling rapidly, making it unlivable by the end of the first day of the outage. I got a room at a local motel, but that solution was too expensive in case the power wasn't restored for days, and the electric company was warning customers full restoration could take a week or more. The next day I went to my sister's 90 miles to the south and stayed there for the next two nights.

On my third day at my sister's, the power was restored at home. I determined this by dialing my home phone. When my electrically-powered answering machine responded, I new the power had to be on. I packed  my things and headed home. It was good to be back. I'm grateful to my sister for putting me up for a couple of nights. Now I'm contemplating installing a generator. I'm getting too old to be driven out of my house by the increasingly destructive weather we've been experiencing in recent years.