Sunday, July 8, 2012
Sunday, July 1, 2012
The Blackout
Friday night, storms blew through Our Nation's Capital and knocked out power to pretty much everyone. Our electric company services about 830,000 customers in Northern Virginia and was reporting outages to about 350,000 of those customers on Saturday. The District of Columbia and Suburban Maryland face a similar situation with about 350,000 outages. Heading south, the power is on in Fredericksburg, but not in Woodbridge, at least as of yesterday.
By the way, did I mention we're in a heat wave? It was 104 on Friday, 98 yesterday, 94-97 expected today. I hate hot weather and I know I'm quite a wuss about it, but 104 is fucking hot. It's so humid you can actually smell it. That's right. Humidity has an actual not-unpleasant odor. Kind of green and sweet.
We slept at home Friday night. Once the storms passed, there was some cooler air behind it and it was reasonably comfortable, although I had to sleep without my medical device, which meant I slept in 45 second increments for about 3 hours. Our first thought was to check for outage updates. There was no telephone connection, either on the cell or the land line. There was no internet because I used up the battery powering one of my medical devices. OK then. Let's just assume the power will not be restored on Saturday. Plan: Board the dog at the vet and move into a hotel. No problem.
We couldn't call the vet, so we drove there. No power at the vet. The size of the issue was beginning to occur to us. We couldn't get home on the back roads because of downed trees and power lines. We turned on the radio and learned, oh! it's the entire National Capital Region. They were listing hotels with vacancies and gas stations with power, the assumption being that everything was closed unless they were on the list. There is no way we're finding a hotel that accepts dogs and has a room.
Ponder ponder ponder.
By the way, did I mention we're in a heat wave? It was 104 on Friday, 98 yesterday, 94-97 expected today. I hate hot weather and I know I'm quite a wuss about it, but 104 is fucking hot. It's so humid you can actually smell it. That's right. Humidity has an actual not-unpleasant odor. Kind of green and sweet.
We slept at home Friday night. Once the storms passed, there was some cooler air behind it and it was reasonably comfortable, although I had to sleep without my medical device, which meant I slept in 45 second increments for about 3 hours. Our first thought was to check for outage updates. There was no telephone connection, either on the cell or the land line. There was no internet because I used up the battery powering one of my medical devices. OK then. Let's just assume the power will not be restored on Saturday. Plan: Board the dog at the vet and move into a hotel. No problem.
We couldn't call the vet, so we drove there. No power at the vet. The size of the issue was beginning to occur to us. We couldn't get home on the back roads because of downed trees and power lines. We turned on the radio and learned, oh! it's the entire National Capital Region. They were listing hotels with vacancies and gas stations with power, the assumption being that everything was closed unless they were on the list. There is no way we're finding a hotel that accepts dogs and has a room.
Ponder ponder ponder.
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