Introduction

This post will start of with a live blog of the current power situation due to the hurricane. After this I’ll be concluding the post with an overview of the utility and power line situation is Connecticut.

Live Blog

Providing live blogs when possible of the current situation here:

2:15 pm Monday – I was working from home today. Our office was shutting down at 1pm and it was safer to work from home and avoid the roads. At around 2:15 the power went out . We will shortly be cranking up the generator. Currently posting from iPhone while G3 is still available.

7:05pm Monday – Our power came back on again around 4:30. It has gone out then come back on again twice. It’s now dark and from what we can see, one tree has split in two in the back yard (thankfully it turned out to just be a large tree limb), and the garden shed is wrecked.

8:16pm Monday – We’ve had a fire truck on the street visiting one of the houses, hopefully it was nothing serious. Plenty of debris flying about including numerous signs from people yards for election candidates.

One of neighbors cars has had a basketball net that was cemented into the ground land on it.

10:15pm Monday – The power has gone out again.

Tuesday Morning– The worst of the weather is gone now. Taking a drive we can see power lines and trees down all over the place. The snow storm last year seems to have taken out a lot of the dead trees, so it could have been lot worst. Compared to New York, New Jersey and Long Island sound  we have gotten off very very lightly.

McDonalds appears to be the only place open.

Tuesday Afternoon – No power all day. I spent some of the day moving location trying to find an Internet connection. Went to my in-laws business and we had power for most of the morning, then around 1:30 it cut out.

Eventually made it via detours to the office for a couple of hours.

Cleaned up a lot of the debris in the garden and managed to jam the shed doors back on. Time for a new shed though.

The lawn guy is going to come and take care of the tree.

Thankfully garbage collection is coming Wednesday so we threw out some of the food from the refrigerator.

Tuesday Evening – Still no power. We have now cranked up he generator and are running some of the house off of it. A few places are open for food so we are going to heat out.

Finished a chapter of the ook but can’t submit it via email until the morning.

Hoping for power back on Wednesday

Wednesday  8am – Power is still out. Checking the utility company’s website I can see that 35% of the town are still down. Hopefully they can resolve this today.

Thursday Evening  – We got a our power back on finally Thursday evening. The lawn guy is coming Saturday to take down the dead tree and remove the branch.

Conclusion

Parts of Connecticut really got hit badly by the storm (the coast), but I think overall as a state inland we got off very lightly.

The CT Air National Guard released this video of the coast line which shows the severity:

It looks like the power companies will have most people (around 98%) back up with power by the end of day tomorrow.

I’m sure the question is going to be asked about why cables aren’t being run underground and how the grid can be made more resilient to storms.

I’m also going to be looking into the pros and cons of a solar system to act as a backup for black outs – this is the third major storm we have had since August last year where we have had power knocked out for days on end.