The Lights Go Down

On Sunday, September 14th, around two-thirty in the afternoon, Ike visited Ohio.

We had hurricane-force winds, gusts up to 84 mph, though only a few drops of rain. Trees came down with a crunch and a crack ... thankfully not hitting anything crucial in my immediate vicinity, though there is a house nearby more or less demolished by an old-growth tree.

A couple million people throughout the state, Indiana and Kentucky without power -- about ninety percent of Duke's customers. They had recently released a lot of their workers to aid down in Texas, which left us vulnerable when the lines went down.

Here, the neighborly thing: everyone pitched in, sawing limbs, hacking branches, trying to reduce the fallen to a manageable pile - and succeeding.

Power had come back to the commercial district by mid-morning yesterday. Ice was snatched as soon as it was unloaded; batteries, with the exception of double and triple As, were nowhere to be found. Panera, the most convenient source of wireless, was packed to the insulation in the walls ... so many people reaching out to a world that had abruptly gone dark.

My power returned about 4pm this afternoon ... I'm still in the minority ...

You never realize how many things depend, directly or indirectly, on a power-source until you have no access.