I am heroic; praise me.

[snarp]

It appears that a one-hour thunderstorm is enough to shut Montgomery County down completely for more than twenty-four hours. The stoplights aren't even working yet; I'm presently in the cafe at the Whole Foods at Friendship Heights, worrying about my bus ride home.

I have been in the Whole Foods cafe in question for about four hours, working on the non-profit I volunteer for's email. Another volunteer who didn't know what he was doing, and then disappeared, made some obviously-doomed changes to it. When an organization has six employees who are constantly sending large scanned documents around, 150 MB space is not enough for every single email account to share. Their hosting plan and budget make scaling up impractical.

I went ahead and switched them over to Google Apps, but now it's got to do the records propagation business - fortunately they've got a backup address on Yahoo that they're all accustomed to using. I'll still have to wait until the propagation's done to forward all the old email on to the new system, and that might mean coming back up here tomorrow. The power company has issued statements suggesting that it feels inadequate to the task of, you know, supplying power within the next twenty-four hours.

I will buy lots of bread, sardines, and dried stuff - luckily, that's what was on the list already. Fortunately the water and gas lines are okay.

Comments

[inkstone]

Driving into work was like driving into a whole new world. I live in Northern VA but work in Bethesda so I went from fully functional to... traffic lights out and trees blocking the road. it was a big load of WTF for me.

[snarp]

It's pretty freaky. I was near a window when the wind started up - I saw a big tree go down in the yard, and felt it wise to move deeper into the house.

[chomiji]

>shrug<

Said one-hour storm had winds of more than 60 mph in some areas. Brief duration doesn't matter when you have that much wind power. I drove down 410 at 4:30 yesterday and saw huge broken branches hanging in the dangerously sagging lines along the road.

Certainly big, bumbling bureauracies have their issues. But the task of getting every power line back into place and functioning in MoCo, where we love our big trees with their spreading branches, isn't actually a trivial one.

Our immediate neighborhood dodged the bullet this time, but during Hurricane Isabel in 2003, we lost power and didn't have it back for a week.

Meanwhile, the pharmacy for my meds is right in the middle of a no-power corridor. This will become a problem by Wed. night.

[snarp]

Agreed, it was a bad storm - a pretty big tree got uprooted in our yard, and part of the fence is, as a direct consequence, no longer embedded in the ground. But I really think they should've at least gotten generators hooked up to the stoplights after a day. I saw several near-accidents on my way into town. I assume there must have been people working on it somewhere, but I've only seen one truck, and that was in Friendship Heights.

[mikkeneko.livejournal.com]

Oops! Hope they have everything back up and running soon.

[lacrimawanders.livejournal.com]

Deservedly praise is yours.