Well I am affected in a Magnavox console sort of way. Last weekend, I was set to rent a panel truck on the Delaware coast, head west over the the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, which must rise a good hundred feet above the water and, with a refrigerator, return east from Baltimore with my aunt's '61 (tuning meter, not magic eye) Magnavox French Provincial console.
The winds were so fierce that the Bay Bridge was actually totally shut down for just about the entire day of Friday, my intended travel day. Usually they restrict large closed vans when the wind is bad enough, or shut down some lanes or lower the speed limit, but this time it was totally shut down. It was scary enough heading over the bridge the next day in a passenger car.
I am staying at a Marriott near Baltimore's airport and I got my sister the last available room cuz my niece she lives with has lost electricity. Her husband actually bought a generator after everyone in the area had lost power. So that makes two surprises-----that a motel room was still available, and that generators weren't sold out. But everyone around here seems to have learned their lesson in the last few years.
Five years ago, driving down my old street after a windy snowstorm with the car window open, I heard nothing but total silence, now I hear one generator after another when traveling by the houses, and I see a lot of steady lights in the windows. Also, the last time I went down the street I saw house after house with their south
roofs covered with acres of solar panels. Losing power hurts my street more than usual because we all have wells instead of city water.
The preparations people make for the next storm relate to the time they spent without power after the last storm. There's a heartwarming feeling when downing strong coffee, eggs and bacon made on a Coleman stove, and hearing the oil burner running on a generator stocked with several full gasoline cans. With any luck I will get that same feeling next winter blizzard when the lights go out---but only for a few seconds because then my automatic LPG powered generator will start itself and the lights go back on along with the heater keeping the well pump and tank from freezing.
It is truly scary how even the most prepared among us can only go a week or so without power before we're as bad off as someone who made no preparations.
Topic: Storms (Read 825 times)
