The Northeast gets a lot of ice and snow storms that bring trees down on telephone lines and damage electrical equipment, causing blackouts. The area has also seen its fair share of hurricanes and tropical storms like Irene.
But while most people from the Northeast—New Englanders in particular—are a tough breed because of the winters, I’m not sure anyone is ever really prepared for this.
By some estimates, up to 7 million people are without power and 38 are dead from South Carolina to Maine after Irene. High winds pulled down power lines and trees that damaged power equipment. On the coast, floodwaters washed over electrical stations and threatened underground power lines.
It’s so bad that some of the major power companies on the East Coast have set up pages on their websites where people can report power outages. (More on that later.)
Transportation in the Northeast has ground to a halt—thousands of flights were cancelled and the trains and buses stopped running—although it’s now starting to come back.
According to CNN, the storm destroyed over 200 roads and bridges in Vermont alone. (Many of those bridges were quaint covered bridges that had been around forever.)
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I sent a mass text message to friends in New England this morning. I assumed they were fine because the experts had downgraded the storm, but you never know. All I said was: ‘Everyone safe and sound?’
I still haven’t heard back from all of them, but from what I’ve gathered, the areas where they live were some of the luckier ones—mostly just high winds and rain and no major flooding.
I can easily picture what some of the rivers I know look like in southern Maine right now, although I really don’t want to picture what they look like in New York and Vermont.
(Of course, some of the people I’ve sent texts to aren’t usually on the ball with the ‘texting’ anyway—you know the types…‘Oh, I didn’t have my cell phone turned on.’ Then why do you have one? But that’s another post.)
I’m just glad I don’t have to wait for whatever phone lines that have inevitably gone down to come back up. It often takes days for the power and phones to come back when the lines get hit.
Everyone I know has a mobile phone, so I can reach them. And mobile phones are really the only viable form of communication during disasters.
Jumping back to the power company websites, mobile phones are pretty much the only way someone without power can report it. Even if your computer has battery power, your modem and router still need direct power for you to get online.
(With that in mind, the State of South Carolina actually signed a contract with Plum right before Irene hit so it could provide information to the public via an IVR system.)
Anyway, I’m starting to feel an inkling of what the Japanese felt during the tsunami earlier this year—trying to reach friends and family on mobile phones. Only an inkling, though. I don’t pretend to know how they truly felt.
