If you've noticed that my LEM contributions have been a bit light
recently, the reason is that I've been a bit preoccupied by events
beyond my control.
Hurricane
Earl, which came ashore on September 4 about 200 miles to the east
of me, could've been worse - in my neck of Nova Scotia at least. The
note of late forecast optimism that Earl would track farther north and
dissipate somewhat by hitting the colder, 16°C waters of the Bay of
Fundy evaporated Saturday morning when the storm took a jink to the
eastward where offshore water temperature was reportedly 21° C.
Earl's massive breadth meant it looked like we would get a thumping
here after all.
We had things pretty well battened down, and at 1:00 p.m. - just
before the storm peaked here - we still had power, could watch TV news
updates, and were becoming a little bit hopeful that maybe the power
wouldn't go off after all. Then a particularly strong gust hit, and the
power quit.
Okay, that was how it was going to be. We were prepared. Our water
is gravity fed, which is a great blessing in power outages. Cooking is
possible on a propane camp stove. We have lots of flashlights with
spare batteries on hand, a freshly charged 12 volt power pack, and a
small gasoline generator that can alternately keep the refrigerator and
freezer running or power lights, small appliances, and even the TV. Not
the most convenient, but as long as the gas (both kinds) held out, we
would be reasonably comfortable.
Power to my wireless broadband service tower was out, but I could
still log on to the Internet by logging on to a friend's dial-up
account (I have her permission for emergencies).
My storm-tourist daughter and I spent Saturday afternoon, which was
the height of the storm, working on my truck out in the garage,
intermittently venturing out to shore up woodpile tarp tie-downs and
the like. It was certainly windy, but we've had worse here, as recently
as last winter, and we sustained no damage to the house or
outbuildings.
The wind had died down by suppertime, and we anticipated that the
power would be back on by Sunday morning latest. A call to Nova Scotia
Power's outage line put that to rest, with estimated time of
restoration tentatively predicted at 11:30 p.m. Sunday.
Then the telephone died.
To the best of my recollection, we've never before lost phone (and
therefore dial-up Internet) service in any of the depressingly many
power interruptions we've had here over the past 15 years or so.
However, on a trip to the local telco's switching substation, we were
greeted by dead silence rather than the usual hum and whir of cooling
fans. The prevailing theory locally was that the station's backup
battery had lasted only about 12 hours before running dead. I don't
know how accurate that hypothesis was, but it sounded plausible.
The double-whammy of losing both power and the phone made it more
difficult to remain philosophical and patient (my daughter's iPhone
wouldn't work here either, as Rogers Wireless, Apple's Canadian service
provider partner, cell and GSM service peters out about 35 miles north
of here). So it was a psychological boost at least when the phone
returned late Sunday evening, as we hunkered down for our second night
with no power, the hot water tank depleted, and cooking on just two
burners getting tedious.
Camp stove sized propane canisters last a dismayingly short time
when you're doing serious cooking, even for two, making tea and coffee,
and so forth. We didn't run out, but we were down to our last reserve
canister at the end of two days. We don't barbecue, but some way to
feed the camp stove from a 20 pound barbecue propane cylinder would be
more economic.
Our little Chinese-made two-cycle gasoline generator is pretty
parsimonious of fuel, getting about six hours runtime from a four-litre
tankful, but we needed to refill our two-gallon gas can at the local
convenience store (also running on a generator) Sunday morning, even
with shutting our genny off overnight to conserve fuel. Memo to self:
Get a bigger gas can.
I finally connected with a real human being at Nova Scotia Power on
Monday morning and was told that the best guesstimate for restoration
would be 6 p.m. that day. I was assured that repair crews were on the
case, but that sparsely populated areas like ours are a lower priority,
which is I suppose rational, but not especially encouraging.
Consequently, it was a relief when the power came back on around 1:00
p.m., making the outage just about 48 hours over three calendar
days.
I don't want to over-dramatize these relatively minor "hardships".
Folks to the west of us suffered substantial property damage from Earl,
and one man lost his life trying to secure a runaway boat. However, the
truly frustrating thing about this episode in our local context is
that, as noted, while it was severe weather, Earl didn't seem to be a
catastrophically bad storm here. Neither we, nor any of the neighbors I
canvassed, experienced any significant property damage. While a power
interruption was gloomily anticipated based on recent history, 48 hours
seems disproportionately long given the magnitude of the blow we
received here, especially when other rural areas that got hit harder by
the hurricane had theirs restored sooner. The roughly 20 hour telephone
outage added insult to injury. However we were relatively fortunate.
Some folks had no power for five days.
Most people in this corner of the woods have portable generators
now, while nobody did 20 years ago. Long power outages used to be a
rarity, but over the past decade or so they became monotonously common.
My uncle next door has a 3000 W Honda generator that connects to the
main house circuits, which I expect is very convenient. Our little 880
W generator is much more modest, but it made the difference between
having all the food in the refrigerator and freezer ruined and sitting
around in the dark. I think the ideal would be a propane or natural gas
fueled generator that would cut in automatically when the power
failed.
Anyway, the circumstances weren't conducive to writing productivity
over the long weekend, and nature wasn't through with us yet. I had
hoped for at least a couple of weeks of unexciting weather, but it was
not to be.
Wednesday evening a series of thunder and lightning storms rolled
through. I was not feeling well, having developed four degrees of fever
throughout that evening, cause as yet unexplained since I didn't and
don't have any cold or flu symptoms. Anyway, I was in substantial pain
with the fever and not paying much attention to the weather, but
vaguely registered some thunderclaps rolling by. I lay down for a bit
around midnight with the intent of getting up to do some work later,
but woke up at 12:30 in the dark.
Another power outage. Oh joy.
Around two o'clock, the thunder and lightning really socked in, and
we experienced violent weather with cells of torrential rain for about
an hour and a half. We had some close lightning strikes. One sounded
like it hit out in the backyard. I dragged myself out of bed to unplug
computers and appliances, hoping I had not left it too long. The phone
stayed working this time, so I called NSP's outage line and the
recording told me that yes indeed there was a power outage affecting my
area, with an estimated tower restoration of 2 a.m. By two o'clock,
that had been bumped forward to four o'clock, then 10 a.m. Thursday,
and by 8 a.m. they were saying 4:30 Thursday afternoon. That was too
long to leave the refrigerator and freezer, so I dragged out the
generator and the long extension cords again and fired it up.
I also discovered that even though my MacBook had been unplugged
during the worst of the lightning event, static electricity in the air
must have woken it up, so the battery was stone cold dead. I plugged it
in as well to recharge. I worked through the morning and early
afternoon on one of my old Pismo PowerBooks that gets
about six hours runtime on an extended life battery. The battery had
just died as the power came back on at 1:30.
However, it seems that one of the lightning strikes must have
damaged the wireless broadband modem at the antenna on the roof, which
looks fine, but refuses to work. I called the ISP's tech support, and
they told me helpfully that my modem wasn't working and that they would
have to send out a service representative, who will not come until next
week sometime. That wasn't acceptable, so I resignedly signed up for my
own dialup account again, my needs now exceeding short-term emergency
status.
Back using dial-up for production, I can't believe how slow it is
after a year with broadband, but it's a lot better than no Internet at
all. At least the damaged modem belongs to the ISP and not to me.
So that's how things stand. More thunderstorms possible in the
forecast. I'll get to the bulging mailbag eventually. This chain of
events has further solidified my conviction that laptop computers are
the way to go and renewed my appreciation for the reliability of good
old hard-wired dial-up Internet, despite the glacial speed, and for the
anvil-like dependability of Pismos in particular.
Update: I got broadband wireless back Monday around I:00 p.m. when
the service representative showed up and replaced the 24 volt AC power
brick for the antenna modem on the roof. The antenna and modem
themselves seem to have survived unscathed.
Had I not been feeling quite ill the night of the lightning storm (I
was in bed, sleepy at 2:00 a.m. and with four degrees of fever at the
time), I would have had the presence of mind to unplug the modem and
router rather than stupidly just turning off the power bar, which is
pretty useless in a lightning strike. However, it's interesting that
the router plugged into the same power bar (which is indoors), and its
power brick survived, so the only casualty was the modem's brick.
Anyway, it's a relief to have broadband back, but I'm not going to
cancel my new dial-up account at least until hurricane season is over.
As I type this, Hurricane Igor and Tropical Storm Julia are churning
their way in this general direction. Sigh.
