We are 'lounging' out here on the Oregon Coast with squalls, rainbows, some sun... but no snow, ice, or outages! But we do tend to get hit hard in March. We shall see...Gasping at the big storm moving across the mid states and East!
You know the store, they have some excellent food, I don't know if the store has power, and if it doesn't, they will lose a ton of stuff. No way to get there safely the way roads are anyway.
My ex is a native of Edmonton. In Denver, below zero temperatures as we have now are rare. She amazed other women in store parking lots here by pulling out our jumper cables and restarting their dead cars.
It came from fiction and memoir articles in old-time Railroad magazine. When I was a kid thumbing through back issues all I knew about Colorado and Wyoming railroading was "Call out the rotary!"
I assume that's been a major factor, perhaps the major factor, in many transit systems shutting down or drastically scaling back service.
Stay home and stay safe from the weather and covid. I learned to never open the fridge or freezer door when power is down... to prolong the time before food starts to spoil... maybe 3 days??? Wishing you hope and luck in snowy Texas!
Reminds me of when I worked for Amtrak at Denver Union Station, during the Christmas Blizzard of 1982...
Not only would you be installing the new lines (and repairing the walls, you would be buying and installing a new oven and range in every unit. Not practical. City wants to shift away from gas cooking to electric, not the other way.When they converted from oil to gas heat, and upgraded the gas and electric service into the building, too bad they didn't also add gas lines to each apartment. but that would have cost a fortune, and not worth it...
I was in Edmonton then but some of my later colleagues at RTD had similar experiences. A handful of people who were stuck in the office at the old Alameda Division kept things going -- when they could figure out which streets were open.
But we don't worry about power outages. I believe that was the same storm I got caught in driving with an elderly lady from St. Paul, MN to Bismarck, ND (didn't make it that far). We were passing all these cars and trucks that had pulled off to the side of the road, but somehow my car didn't stall. However, it was colder with the heat on than with it off because of the blower. The elderly lady I was transporting was wearing a DRESS. Shortly before Jamestown ND, she said that she needed to take an angina pill and would need food to do so (maybe she just wanted to stop). I said that if we stop, we probably wouldn't be able to re-start (plus by this time the visibility was almost zero) so we pulled into a motel in Jamestown that was across the street from a restaurant. The motel clerk gave us a key to a room, but we couldn't get it open because the door was FROZEN SHUT. We went back to the clerk and she gave us a key to a different room and told us this was for her last room. We did get into that one because the door had been left AJAR and it was very cold in that room. We slept in the same bed for warmth. The next day we found out that the wind chill when we were driving the previous day was -90 F! We had been unable to plug my car in that night because someone had stolen the motel's last electrical cord for such purposes. Therefore we and everyone else in Jamestown were calling various mechanics the next day to get their car started. It took several hours for one of them to get to us. I no longer remember if this day was Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. And when one did, they told me afterwards the only way to get it started with this kind of cold was using ETHER which is apparently a dangerous thing to do. But they did get it started using ether and off we went with our wonderful scary winter story to tell.
I don't recall if it was in the aftermath of that particular storm, or a different one, but the coldest temperatures I ever endured, were about -25° F, which lasted about three days. I had to get up hourly all night, to start my car, and run it for about 10 minutes, to insure it would start in time to get me to work in the morning. And then, when I started driving, the tires made thumps from the flat spots for a couple of miles, until they warmed sufficiently to round themselves out. This extreme may be normal for folks in Fairbanks, but was pretty rare in the Denver area...I don't even know what the wind chill was.
As long as you are not on the completely dysfunctional and disconnected from the two national grids, Texas grid, you should be much better off than the poor Texans.
True this! Worst State Government this side of Alabama and Mississippi !As long as you are not on the completely dysfunctional and disconnected from the two national grids, Texas grid, you should be much better off than the poor Texans.
In Texas it has been a massive failure of the entire grid caused by poor planning and disaster preparation, presumably because such things do not make money for anyone, and actually costs money.
