Long power outage a wake-up call to be better prepared
I've just emerged from a brief visit to the 19th century (via a storm-driven 36-hour power outage) and among all my other experiences and impressions during this odd weekend, none was more powerful than an extremely visceral understanding of just how fragile our modern infrastructures are.
This all began when, just as I was about to run out of my Sausalito, Calif., house on Friday morning, I decided to do a quick e-mail check. Oddly, there was no Internet connection, and after a cursory check to see why, I realized that our power was out, a condition that had taken down my Internet service and home phone--which comes in via Comcast cable.
It was no wonder. Outside, fierce and heavy winds and rain were blowing trees nearly horizontal. But I thought it would be a brief outage and, giving it little mind, I ran to catch my bus into San Francisco.
Because of strong winds and heavy rain, hundreds of thousands of Northern Californians lost power beginning Friday. Some are still without power on Monday.
(Credit: PG&E)For more than 20 minutes I stood in the full force of the wind and rain, getting soaked to the bone, wondering where the bus was. Finally, I pulled out my cell phone and called Golden Gate Transit to ask what was up. There were no buses running through Sausalito, I was told, because the town's downtown was "flooded."
I slogged home, unsure what to do. I figured perhaps I could go work at a nearby library or cafe, but it quickly became clear that power was out not just at my house, but throughout Sausalito and in much of the Bay Area. All told, I found out later, something like 1.2 million people throughout Northern California had lost power.
But it wasn't just electricity that was unavailable. In addition to no buses running through Sausalito, sections of highway 101 and the San Rafael Bridge--a major connector from Marin County to the east side of San Francisco Bay--were shut down due to wind-driven chaos. In addition, ferries weren't running and, to my dismay, I discovered that once home, my cell reception was extremely intermittent, far worse than usual, a condition that made it impossible for me to get online via Verizon's EV-DO like my colleague Rafe Needleman did during his own time without power.
Left with no way to get to work--driving really didn't seem safe--and no way to get online or make phone calls, I stayed at home where my wife and I huddled under blankets for most of the day, trying to figure out what to do.
Now, I don't want to sound like I'm complaining. Our experience was pretty mild--we were able to do some modest cooking and make coffee on a propane stove, and we had some battery-powered devices so we could listen to music.
And my wife and I are both veteran campers, so we know how to survive without the amenities American homes offer. And yet, the whole experience was strangely debilitating.
It was also very clear after just a few hours of this just how easily broken America's infrastructure is. It's not that we--or others in similar circumstances--would soon starve or freeze to death. But it was striking just how poorly the system was able to handle what, for many parts of the country, was really not a very serious storm.
What was even more clear was just how reliant we all are on energy--specifically the energy that comes from the grid--and how few options there are for most middle-class Americans.
To be sure, there are plenty of alternatives to electricity from the grid, but from what I know of them, they're not easily available to people with modest means. For people like myself, it feels very much like the only option is to buy electricity from fill-in-the-blank power company, in my case, PG&E, and that I, and most Americans, are stuck using nonrenewable energy for most of the things we do in our daily lives. That really must change, as we all now know.
Which brings me to one complaint I do have about how the power company handled this "crisis."
On Friday, I called PG&E to try to get an estimate of when the power would come back on. At first they told me it would come back by 11 a.m. the same day. That hour quickly came and went, all with no electricity.
That evening, I called again and was able to use their automated system to find out that there was no available estimate. However, the automated system informed me, for those customers who had been without power for 24 hours or more, there was a separate toll-free number to call to talk to an actual human.
Well, that was fine and dandy, except that it hadn't yet been 24 hours since the storm knocked out power throughout the Bay Area.
On Saturday, I called the number again, and for the second time, the automated system told me no estimate was available. But I was waiting for it to tell me the number to call if power had been out for more than 24 hours. I now qualified.
This time, however, it said that for those without power for more than 48 hours, there was a special number to call. How handy for PG&E that no one was yet without power for that many hours. Typical for a utility that declared bankruptcy in 2001 in the middle of one of California's worst-ever energy crises while its corporate parent was hauling in billions in profits from the outrageous price hikes we were paying for power.
By Saturday, my wife and I were kind of at a loss. We were still able to make coffee and, thanks to some dry ice purchased from a nearby market that stayed open with the help of generators, we had saved most of our perishables.
One thing was odd about going to the market was the sense of cultures mixing: those with power and those without. The store had blocked off its freezer aisle and was offering limited services, but it had received a regular delivery of bread from a bakery in Berkeley. And in the checkout line, I overheard someone saying what I had been thinking since soon after this all began: This would all be just fine if we could just watch movies.
Hearing this woman say what I was thinking made me feel guilty. As crises go, this was pretty mild. Yet, because of the systems we're used to, we're often left with few internal resources to know how to handle a loss of basic infrastructure. It's not something to complain about, but it's a warning sign that when a real crisis hits--a major earthquake, for example--it is painfully obvious that our way of life will be abruptly cut off. Just look at what happened in New Orleans or in Southern California during the fires there last fall.
Finally, late on Saturday, as my wife and I were contemplating what seemed like the reality that it could be a couple more days before the power returned and that we might have to spend a few hundred dollars on a hotel room, the lights came on. Just like that, with no warning. In those first few minutes, it seemed so tenuous, like counting on the power staying on was foolish and unwise.
Yet stay on they did. Thousands in the Bay Area are still without power at the time of this writing, however, and another fierce storm is expected Tuesday, so who knows what will happen then?
All in all, this was an eye-opening experience for me. I realized just how poorly prepared I am for dealing with something like this, and I have way more knowledge than most due to the time I've spent camping and being far off the grid.
And what it tells me, and what is probably abundantly clear to everyone else, is that we either need to confront our unpreparedness head on, and right now, or risk being cut off from the world for much longer than 36 hours if something really serious ever happens. And if the latter is how it goes, then we will have no one to blame but ourselves.
Daniel Terdiman is a staff writer at CNET News covering games, Net culture, and everything in between. E-mail Daniel. 
flashlights and reading books.
When you get bored, you can always do what comes naturally.
Here when the power go's out nothing works. Try flushing your
toilet by buckets(Fun) One August my power was out for 15 days.
Oh! who changed your diapers you baby
for training and hiring lineworkers. The focus was on profits and
shareholder value instead of customer service. But that's a choice
folks make when they choose deregulation.
Utilities don't need to have a monopoly on the infrastructure. Things got that way because Government got (over)involved years ago. Now we have to dig our way out from the effects.
live. No big deal. Stove still works, toilets
work, phones work, and I've even managed to get
internet with a laptop and a 9V battery wired to
my modem. Yea, it's annoying, but it's not that
much of a problem. And you ought to see a winter
up here and what kind of weather public
transportation (and people) will drive in. There
can be several inches of snow and ice on the
roads and even the buses will still be running.
Heck, a lot of people have their own plows for
days when it gets real bad. Who needs the public
snow plows when the guy down the street can
clear it up on his way to work? lol
Yes, it sucks, it's inconvenient, but it's not
that big of a deal. It's not like they can just
upgrade the whole system because there's one or
two bad outages in a year. And with modern
technology it's becoming more an more obsolete
anyways. You'll be powering your house with your
car during outages before you have full
underground power cables everywhere....and as
wireless technology gets better, you cable being
out won't matter. You may not even have cable.
The infrastructure is far too large to upgrade.
They should have better contingency plans.
But, no. Not only can't they handle the emergencies, but they can barely handle the peak power requirements during exceptionally hot summers or cold winters.
IMHO, these companies should be putting more resources into the infrastructure.
But of course, God forbid the investors might not be able to buy their 16 year old kids that new Porsche for the summer.
The whole power mess in CA today is the result of a unaminous vote in the state goverment a decade or more ago...nobody voted against it. When Republicans and Democarats willing go in on something together....yeah, they did a great job.
And as far as contingency plans...if you'd like to find people from my lazy ass generation (mid 20's) to actually become electrical workers and get out of clubs and away from their video games and replace all the people retiring, good luck.
That's too hard? Money going to game consoles, $50 games, MP3 players, mobiles equipped with cameras/music players/video players/Web browsers/espresso machines?
That's a different challenge. The power industry can't help you with that - as long as you have a lot of batteries ......
With the addition of a multi-fuel generator (I run it with LP Gas), I have weathered a couple of multi-day outages.
One of the few mentioned advantages of DSL over cable is it is self powered and if the lines aren't damaged by whatever you are dealing with then it continues to function when the cable won't. Typically cable only works if the local mux has juice and if your neighborhood is cold, usually the mux is. I learned this lesson the hard way.
I tried using satellite and there is nothing fun about climbing a ladder in sleet and freezing rain to beat the ice off the dish to fix reception.
It really boils down to some simple planning for the kind of events that hit your area and some reasonable investment to deal with those events. It's the same exercise as you would do for your business just on a smaller scale.
Katrina we had no electricity for 4 months (near the beach), and
no phones or cable for at least 6 months. We now have satellite
TV and internet, cell phones and a big generator in the back.
We learned the hard way that it is foolish to depend on the inept
gov't or greedy grid utilities for anything but unloading one's
wallet in fees and taxes. None them seem to want to maintain
lines. We will be installing a solar system next, and our goal is
to be off-the-grid in suburbia. The average person CAN afford
and maintain a solar system, and grid-tie will only keep the
utility companies in control. Who needs them? If another
disaster happens, we may just not hook back up.
and reliable than gasoline and can also be used to recharge the
bank. Plus, LP can be made from coal while not green, it's at
least US produced. I am glad that we don't have to remove ice
from sat dishes as another reader posted. In spite of the
national views of MS, we are quite resourceful. That would be
why we seldom made the news even though we actually caught
the brunt of the storm. We don't whine and wait for welfare or
gov't bailout like NOLA. A better discussion of renewable energy
can be found at realgoods.com or homepower.com
My mother had a natural gas generator set up to power her heating/cooling systems as well as her computer room and security systems. Unfortunately, the generator was not putting out 60 HTZ power so the UPSes crashed.
I gambled on 2007 not having any major power outages, and didn't buy a generator. This year I'm definitely installing a generator over the summer.
Yes we should pay marginally more than we do and we would get a 10x better system if we took that one part out.
It may very well save the electric company quite a bit of money. Every year or two large parts of the OGE system gets destroyed by ice or a tornado. Even a normal thunderstorm with winds of 70 or 80 MPH will take out big chunks of the grid. Not having to go without power for a few days a year will be nice.
figure out what to do? How about #$^&)!@ you brains out and have
some fun?
- POTS works when the power is out
- by chris_d January 9, 2008 5:31 PM PST
- I guess a lot of people don't realize how unreliable the phone service from the cable company is. If the power goes out, you're screwed. My parents had a 36-hour power outage last year and their Qwest phone service worked the entire time. I make sure they have a wired phone (cordless requires electrical power for the base) The neighbor's cable company phone service quit the instant the juice turned off.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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- POTS from Remote Terminals
- by gjl229 January 10, 2008 1:00 PM PST
- Telco central offices are equipped with generators, as are most of the larger remote huts or buildings supporting remote DLC/DSLAM devices (for POTS and/or DSL). The usual provision is a 24-hour fuel supply.
- Like this
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(30 Comments)I have heard of people running their backup generators and surfing the web with DSL when the power goes out, but this is only a guarantee when the DSLAM serving you is in the phone company's central office. If you're on a remote DSLAM... I don't know how many of those actually have a backup power source.
Small huts and outside cabinets housing this POTS and DSL gear are typically equipped with 2-6 hour battery backup as well as connection points for a small external generator.
Power systems are usually alarmed so the telco knows the location and scope of the power problems.
When the outage is very widespread, the telco will probably not be able to get generators to all these very small sites immediately. They deal with this by calling in add'l generators from elsewhere as well as from contractors and other sources. They'll then rotate the generators from one site to another - charging the batteries and moving on.
It's not perfect, but telcos are not helpless as long as there's road access for generators and fuel.
I'll let the cable folks speak for themselves.