I live in the mountains. During the warmer months the power
company regularly turns off our power to do "maintenance"
upgrades on the system. They generally do this during the
day... when it is 90*F (+/-) and generally for anywhere
between 4 and 16 hours.
In the years that I have lived up here they never did this
during the winter... until this year. But now they have
decided to only do it overnight. So from 8pm until 4am
we will be without power. Our heating system is natural
gas based, but requires power to function. It is 23*F out
right now. It is 7:40p. So we will lose power in just a bit
here. My wife is tucking my daughter in and we will bring
her upstairs to sleep with us when we go to sleep (so that
we know she is under blankets and warm enough).
I cannot for the life of me figure out why they would do
these planned outages overnight in winter... while snow
blankets the ground. It has been planned for months, so it
is not an urgent repair. I know they are just fireproofing
the power poles and installing some additional anti-fire
safety measures. We are in a fire prone area and these are
good things. I support having the upgrades done. But we
also live in an area where tourism for snow play is popular.
I cannot excise the thought that the power company or the
government or whoever else is involved in the decisionmaking
would rather families shiver and freeze at night than have
businesses lose money because their power is out during
prime business hours. You know, the hours where most people
could easily just drive a few neighborhoods over and still
sit in a warm coffee shop or movie theater to wait out the
repairs. Instead they do it during the hours where we are
in our houses with our children trying to get some sleep
and don't really have good options for alternate plans
beyond going to stay with family 2 hours away. We have a
generator, but it is finicky and on a full tank will only
run for around 3 hours. We keep meaning to get a basic
solar/battery setup to be able to get us through nights
like this, but a mix of costs and lack of knowhow on our
part have kept it from happening yet. Hopefully by next
winter.
Either way, I plan to write my representative and see if
something can be done in the legislature or maybe at a
county level to prevent planned outages overnight during
the winter. Maybe base it on the forecasted temp. It is
in the 40s here during the day, which is much more
tollerable.
Sorry for the whining gopherspace. This just has me quite
annoyed.
Have a good night!
[EDIT]: instead of the scheduled 8 hours, it was off for
twelve.
