A taste of third world living [View all]
We are among the one million power customers in the Mid Atlantic sweltering through a heat wave made worse by a power outage. Our temperatures were hovering at the three digit mark as the only sound apart from the birds were the drones of the few souls running their generators while not offering a few amps to anyone else.
The rest of us sit and swelter.
Traffic lights don't work. Drivers are either uncertain and crawling through intersections or dangerously speeding through as if it is their birthright.
The capriciousness of it all is amazing. The little 7-11 has power from the grid while the big supermarket next door is dark. A restaurant has his big billboard sized LED sign ablaze, telling all who pass that he is open (and hopin') for business. A man I know to be foreign born sits at the open door to his gas station's garage bay, sweating in the oppressive heat, with a sign saying his pumps don't work but he will tune your car up for half price, today only.
Freezers full of food are imperiled as we are reduced to cooking outdoors on coals or heating up our houses to blast furnace level as we are lighting stoves with matches.
The dry ice plants that we normally rely on at times like these to help keep our precious frozen food frozen are selling out their stocks, but have no power to make more.
My iPhone, rechargeable in the car, is the new millennium version of a transistor radio. The local all news radio station just announced that the driver called and said he'd just delivered a full truckload of ice to one of the local supermarkets.
I sit here in a bit of a hole between cell towers, writing this on my iPad, knowing I have to drive a bit to get it to connect . . . . . or wait a looooong time for it to go through.
We went to five gas stations earlier today and never did get any gas. Four had no power and the fifth had no gas. Good thing Sparkly's new car gets good mileage. That quarter tank ought to last a while, even as we go driving just to cool off and charge our electrical gadgets.
There's no looting . . . . . so far. I am sure, given the unbearable heat and the extreme boredom, that will happen, too.
People always pull together at times like these.
Until they don't.
I think the looting point is a few days away right now. But it will come. It always does in third world countries.
How'd you like to be the guy in the power company truck, driving through and assessing damage, but not stopping to fix things yet? You think he'll be popular as he drives through, with no answers for you?
So here we sit, a day's buggy ride from the nation's Capitol, with no power, low fuel, high heat, and reduced to cooking on fires, not for fun, but of necessity.
And no one can tell us when it might end.
A million power customers, probably four million people, sitting outside, in the unrelenting heat, just trying to get by.
In what seems just like a third world country.
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