Lord Sutch, author of "Signifying Nothing," is off-line in St. Louis, as many of his fans have no doubt noticed.
(may be back up by the time you read this, of course).
But I pinged him on email, and learned that his power had been out for more than 50 hours, following the winter storm that hit St. Loo this week. He runs the site on his home machine as a web server.
I asked for details, and got this back:
I'm fine, except for being a little bit cold (I've been camping out in
my office, which has heat but isn't all that comfortable). I just
booked a hotel room for tonight in case my power isn't back - the
power company's estimates for when power will be back are pretty much
useless, although they said Friday that some customers might not have
power for 5 days (i.e. until Wednesday).
At worst, about 1/2 million Ameren customers were without power; as of
now, that's down to just under 400,000. In my zip code, the number
of outages actually went up since Friday before finally coming down a
little in the past couple of hours. What's most irritating is that
there is power within 2 blocks of my apartment (there's a large
shopping mall within 1/4 mile that briefly lost some of its power on
Saturday, but the power company had them fixed very quickly), but for
some reason they seemed to have skipped over my neighborhood.
Yikes! For details on the storm, you can see this, or this. I hope Ameren's motto, "365 and then some," is not an estimate how many hours it will take to restore power....
Be strong, Lord Sutch. The crack staff of Ameren is on their way!
3 comments:
As of 8:00 or so, there was a crew in my neighborhood and as of a few minutes ago the enigmatic "My Electric Outage" status said they had figured out that a tree had attacked the power line, but still no details. And I'm not dragging my butt out again in 10-degree weather to check personally.
If it isn't fixed by morning, Paris Hilton's trust fund will no doubt be getting some more of my money.
The distribution of energy fixes would be an interesting thing to study. When the ice storm hit Durham, the main road two blocks from us never lost power (or it was restored quickly), our subdivision and the one next two it (the latter of which is fairly well off) received power in 48 hours, and the street in between that contains older townhomes and low to medium rent apartments went without power for well over a week. More generally (while still anecdotal), while I had friends who lived in nice parts of town who were without power for a week or more, on average it seemed that economic class was correlated with when my friends/fellow church members got their lights again.
Good job! :)
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