Without power for over a week

"That's the night the lights went out in Georgia"
-lyrics in song of the same name

The day before Halloween, a freak snowstorm dump inches of wet heavy snow on New York, New Jersery, and New England states. Because the trees still had leaves attached, hundreds of thousands of braches became too heavy and broke. Now this does not sound like a big deal, certainly not as flashy a disaster as a hurricane or earthquake, and yet the consequences have been extreme. The Halloween nor'easter knocked out power to over 3 million homes. Connecticut was hit especially hard and over 100,000 residents of Connecticut are without power a week after the storm and they are NOT happy about it.  See Tempers flare over 6 days of Conn. power outages written on Nov 4.

“Angry residents left without heat as temperatures drop to near freezing overnight have been lashing out at Connecticut Light & Power: accosting repair crews, making profane criticisms online and suing. In Simsbury, a hard-hit suburban town of about 25,000 residents, National Guard troops deployed to clear debris have been providing security outside a utility office building.”

Abusing the work crews is a VERY bad idea. Some of these repairmen have left their familes in mid-west states to work here around the clock.  (A loose wire at our house was fixed at 3:30 in the morning.)

What went wrong? One reader of Instapundit, surmises,

Not sure what goes wrong, but it sounds like greed in not wanting to hire enough workers, failure to pay out of state crews that came up to help with Irene, incompetence, and poor character.

It's possible that Connecticut Light & Power (CL&P) underestimated the massive scope of the damage and was slow to mobilize outside help. Regional disasters like this are particuallarly hard to solve because you cannot just call in workmen from neighboring states. Instead those states are desparate for extra repairmen also and everyone is competing for workers from outside the disaster area. And this is a repeat from just months ago during "hurricane" Irene so "favors" used up, emergency funds spent, emergency workers burnt out.

Bottom Line

It's events like this that show why you must be able to take care of yourself and your family. Can you supply your own heat, light and food for two weeks? If not, why not?