EXTRA! EXTRA!
According to news reports, yesterday's blackout will apparently go down as the worst this country has seen to date. Although some of you may have noticed that my server was unavailable for the better part of the day, Nicole and I lucked out. It seems the road that we live off of was one of only a handful in the Rochester area that was unaffected by the outage. Had we lived literally half a block over I--most likely--would not be posting this update today.
The lights went out in New York City around 4:15 p.m. EST, but it took nearly 15 minutes for the outage to spread upstate. At about 4:32 p.m. EST the lights flickered and the surge protectors tripped, but other than that our apartment managed to maintain its electrical power. Our cellular phone and internet services were not so lucky, however, and we were without Internet and cell phones for several ours. Needless to say, we were quite lucky.
It's amazing how people forget how to think when the power goes out. It's almost as if their common sense needs the AC to function. Most of you have seen the pictures from Manhattan so I do not need to describe to you the traffic nightmare caused by the lack of power. However, I find it amazing that here in Chili--a town with at most a handful of traffic signals--the drivers were almost equally unable to maintain traffic flow. I can understand the gridlock in Manhattan and think that New Yorkers (by New Yorkers I mean those in the city) did an outstanding job at maintaining order; what I cannot understand, however, is why the people up here were unable to grasp the concept of treating a non-functional traffic signal as if it were a four-way stop sign. This town of less than 3,000 people seemed to go out of its way to pay homage to Manhattan's plight by similarly recreating their traffic problems.
What I also found interesting was the lack of police direction during the outage. While I did not drive through the actual city of Rochester, I did drive through some of the most heavily traveled intersections in some areas surrounding it and was surprised not to see a single traffic cop. In fact, ordinary citizens ended up taking it upon themselves to direct traffic. At one such intersection, a 20-something man sporting shorts, a t-shirt, and a baseball cap stood in the middle of the street utilizing traffic-directing skills he must have acquired from television. Drivers were grateful for his presence. In Los Angeles he would probably have been arrested.
Throughout the day the local media urged people to avoid "any unnecessary travel." Of course, that didn't prevent the from turning streets into the buisiest I have seen them since moving here two months ago. People panic when the lights go out and even though I knew that the power would be restored in a few hours, everyone else felt it necessary to recreate gas station scenes not seen since the fuel shortages of the 1970s. Cars were lined up 20-deep behind each pump at the gas station on the corner. The owners must have been thrilled, but we all know that there was little need for the emergency fuel up.
Actually, maybe the panic wasn't as uncalled for as I previously stated. When the Chili "Chil-e" festival is the most exciting event to hit this area all year, maybe the excitement of a major blackout is what we all needed. There is a part of me that felt kind of left out because our building never lost power. At the gym last night, I overheard a couple of people getting all worked up by the television. One of them looked as if he was about to tear it off of the wall and smash it to bits--as if it were solely responsible for sucking up all the electricity. He turned to his friend and with rage in his eyes said, "It's going to be weeks! Weeks until they turn the power back on!"...and stormed off.
We all need to work ourselves up into a frenzy every now and then...to stay sane.
posted at 07:56