An Analog 72 Hours
For the past 72 hours, I’ve been forced offline due to the powerful storm that ripped across the Northeast. For those who are writing this off as just another snow storm, it might have been in your neck of the woods but where my family is located, we were hit with over 30″ of snow, down trees in our yard, and powerlines down on both sides of our street which prohibited us from leaving our home until they were fixed and deemed safe.
It all started on Thursday afternoon when I was in my office in Manhattan and received a call from my wife who said that the power had flickered a few times as the snow was falling. Thinking that this was typical of what happens by us during any significant storm, I wrote it off.
Without going into too much detail, the storm took our power at around 8:45pm on Thursday evening, right as I was in my office at home working on some documents (unluckily for me, I can’t retrieve them). Without power doesn’t just mean no computer usage, but also no recharging of electronics. Big issue.
Over the next 18 hours, we were literally stranded in our own home because we couldn’t leave our development due to down powerlines and trees. Our village that we live in was called into a State of Emergency and all roads were closed. Yes, this really happened.
I went on a reconnaissance mission using our SUV and was able to clear out a path to actually leave the area so I onboarded the wife & kid and we headed out to my folks a few towns over (20 mins away) for the past 36 hours and luckily, they had power.
The snow was so deep, that making snow forts was easy and abundant!
A few things that stuck out:
- We rely so heavily on electronics (computers, iPhones, Blackberrys, Kindles, Nook’s, etc). At times when there is no connectivity, how are we supposed to recharge?
- Even if computers are charged up, unless there is cellular or carrier driven wifi, how are we supposed to get online?
- Facebook became the AM Radio for us. We realized that we didn’t have an AM radio in the house but while my wife’s Blackberry still had power, she was able to log into Facebook and get updates from friends of ours from around the area. She had a mini storm-network setup.
- ConEd had a nice outage location map but their “report a problem” area didn’t work properly
Anyway, it’s nice to be back online with our power restored.
Time to catch up on work while the US hockey team takes on Team Canada. Go USA!