I’ve been separated from the world of personal computing for a while now because of a recent natural disaster that struck home. On Sunday, September 14, the remnants of hurricane Ike swept across Ohio with a ferocity unforeseen by weather forecasters and Dayton took quite a beating. At one point Sunday evening, as many as 300,000 residents were without power, and I’m still one of them.
As of today, September 19, my home and my neighborhood still have no power. I’m at a friend’s house borrowing power and an internet connection for the evening. There are conflicting rumors and no real information about when power will be restored, although all rumors indicate it will be well into next week. Luckily gas lines are underground, so I’ve had hot water all week which makes living in a powerless house inconvenient at worst. Had the weather been something other than our typical September mildness, I would likely have had to abandon the house for the week to find heat or AC.
At the beginning of the outage, the extent of the damage was not apparent to those who hadn’t left home. Gas stations that did have power sold out of gas. Groceries and convenience stores that were open had no ice. D-cell batters were nowhere to be found. Restaurants that had power were packed by hungry people with no power to cook their own food. Traffic lights were out and every intersection became a 4-way stop. With the exception of a few isolated areas, the city was completely dark and more than a little dangerous and creepy.
Ohio has floods and tornadoes. Usually those kinds of natural disasters are comparatively small scale. Hurricane remnants pass over Ohio from time to time and result in severe thunderstorms at worst. This time, a combination of factors turned this remnant into a disaster that affected a large swath of the state.
Some of the people here without power are getting very frustrated because the power company, DP&L, has take a defensive stance and hasn’t communicated well, probably because they don’t have much to communicate. I have no doubt that lineman and tree removers are working themselves to exhaustion, but I get the impression that the effort is a scramble rather than an organized march toward service restoration. Given the choice, I guess DP&L would rather seem defensive than disorganized. Pick your poison.
We get our variety of crazy weather here and I’ve seen a bunch of it, but this has to be the worst I’ve seen, and with the longest lasting effects. I have pictures and video I’ll post when I have an opportunity. The worst damage to my property is some downed tree limbs, but others have had entire tree trunks crash into their homes or the wind ripped off significant pieces of their siding or roof. It has been a frustrating inconvenience for me, but for others it has been a genuine loss of significant proportions.
I know some of my readers also live in Dayton. Do you have any outage experiences to share in the comments section?
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September 20th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
This reminds me of what we faced here in Buffalo a few years back. A freak snowstorm hit in October. Heavy, wet snow piled up on all the trees which were still full of leaves. By the next morning, between downed trees and downed power lines, almost every street in the area was impassible. Photos here. I blogged about it pretty extensively here.
We had to evacuate our house because we had no heat and a low-hanging power line was getting closer and closer to our house. My wife’s parents lived 5 minutes away and had power. With the melting snow, however, I had to return several times a day to bail out the reservoir for the sump pump. We were lucky that our power returned a week later. For others, it took longer.
It has permanently changed the character of the area. Streets which were formerly covered under a canopy of trees are now bare. My parents house, now devoid of many sound-dampening trees, gets to hear every noise coming off of a busy street.
Just like you, we were lucky. Others were not.