Article should be called Lessons you learn living in a place where it regularly snows but with terrible infrastructure and seemingly no societal preparedness for said regular snow
Article should be called Lessons you learn living in a place where it regularly snows but with terrible infrastructure and seemingly no societal preparedness for said regular snow
In other words most of the US outside of a major metro area. I’ve lived various places in Western Washington and the advice about generators and food and batteries and heat ring true everywhere more than an hour away from Seattle or Tacoma
I would add that you should have a backup plan for preparing any holiday meal using a camping stove because the power could go out an hour into roasting a turkey. In fact don’t invite anyone over unless you’ve confirmed ahead of time that they don’t mind sleeping in the same room, together with your family, in front of the wood stove. This could happen even on a clear day. Don’t rely on the electricity in the winter ever.
> I’ve lived various places in Western Washington and the advice about generators and food and batteries and heat ring true everywhere more than an hour away from Seattle or Tacoma
I live on the west side of puget sound, and get two nines of utility power. Undergrounding distribution lines is very expensive given the natural expenses of undergrounding and the shallow soil most of the region has. Undergrounding transmission lines is basically not happening outside of very special cases. Shallow soil also makes trees less stable, so that makes treefall -> utility outage more probable. Roads can get pretty nasty in winter storms too which also contributes to high time to repair.
People can say "bad infrastructure" all you want, but nobody wants to pay a lot more to fight geography for one more nine. Also at least in my community, every tree is sacred even though it's all third growth backfill from multiple clear cuts over the past who knows.
Article doesn't even mention cell towers go down in extended outages. Around me, it's about 4-6 hours, a little longer overnight, but only 30 minutes past when people wake up.
I live in a small town in northern Michigan and while we do somewhat regularly have power outages during the winter, it's when we get freezing rain, snow isn't really a problem (and really, I haven't had issues here in town, I'm describing the issues that have hit the region).
I've lived 40+ years in several places in the northern US, mostly in rural areas and this isn't my experience at all.
> In other words most of the US outside of a major metro area.
Not just outside, I spent 15 years in/around Austin and it got to be ridiculous.
2020 - cleared out the stores at covid.. alright, few people were prepared, none had done it before
2021 - cleared out the stores for the blizzard, lost power for 45min and water for 5 days.. almost no one was prepared, despite the year before
2023 - cleared out the stores for the blizzard, lost power for days due to heavy icing.. some were prepared but not at scale
Some people just don't learn.
Luckily after '20, we prepared. Then in '21, we moved to rural Texas and got solar+battery backup so 2023 wasn't even a blip.
Even in deep Russia I don't think "power goes out with first winter storm" is a thing. and I thought russian infra sucked...
That said I remember power could go out from a lightning storm or without any reason. But pretty rarely
Russian infra doesn’t suck that much, I guess it was overbuilt in soviet times. Armenian, on the oner hand… But they’re “societally prepared” in the sense that repairs are quick usually, and there are even some upgrades recently.
I had a Russian friend tell me that the Soviet mindset was to overbuild.
He said they tended to build “two of everything,” which is why there’s so many sets of two.
If one craps out, the second can be used in its place, or scavenged for parts.
I am in Honolulu right now and the power has gone out twice in the last three days because of high winds.
Or somewhere remote. Czechia is a small country with a well-developed grid and nothing here is really "remote" compared to, say, Alaska.
But people still do have chalets/huts in the mountains, and the authorities won't spend money on burying 10 km of cables in complicated terrain just for a small hut colony or a solitary hut. Which means that the cables go through the air, which means that a fallen tree can sever them, and you won't be particularly prioritized. That said, people who actually live there or spend longer holidays there during winter months, tend to have enough firewood collected to survive such situations comfortably.
It is a different story in cities/villages with compact house patterns. I don't think I ever saw a snow-related blackout in such a place. There, your worst risk is actually flooding. We've had some serious floods in the last decades, and even buried cables will get damaged and short-circuited in such an event. For example, the cable needs to cross a stream, so it is attached to a bridge, high water comes and tears down the entire bridge with the cable as well.