Dalmatian90

1938 my grandfather walked 10 miles to report the death of a neighbor from the hurricane to the state police barracks. They knew the roads wouldn't be open by the next day, forget about the telephone grid. I use neighbor somewhat loosely -- the unfortunate soul lived a couple miles away, my grandfather was one of the folks in the larger neighborhood summoned to try and help rescuing him from the collapsed barn; I imagine there were 10 and 12 year old boys quickly dispatched in all directions to spread the word. Chainsaws were rare, highway departments didn't have payloaders, and every suburban farmer wanna be didn't have 30 horsepower tractors with front end loaders. You can open roads up pretty fast when you're pushing most of the debris out of the way, and only need to make the minimum cuts when necessary to make something small enough to push. (I'm a suburban farmer wannabe.) The electric companies didn't have digger-derrick trucks. They certainly didn't have the ability to mobilize thousands of crews in advance and stage them just outside the expected impact area. Nor any interstates for the crews to travel over -- once they started to mobilize they were driving through the downtown traffic of every city in slower and less reliable trucks. Now people today would be much more bent out of shape -- our dependency on electricity is certainly more. 1938 Connecticut hadn't completed rural electrification (that would come in 1941), so a lot of folks were able to fail back to things like well hand pumps they had grown up using. But the response, especially in the first few days, will be far better than 1938. Doesn't seem like Florida takes more than a couple weeks to get the vast majority of power restored, and the places it takes longer are mainly the relatively small ground zero of the storm coming ashore.

I far from being enough of a weather geek to guess at how today's models would do with the '38 Hurricane for warning...but we're used to days of hype before the storms today come close to New England. I look at the '38 storm going from 75N30W to Long Island in 18 hours and start thinking folks won't believe it and couldn't prep fast enough. Oh well, rain is tapering off in my bit of Connecticut so time to take a tour of town

The last number of storms, dating back at least to the 2008 ice storm, the municipally owned utilities in southern New England were up in around three days, the investor owned ones took two weeks. My favorite example for folks who may think, "But investor owned has more territory|the towns are all different|think of an excuse" ...Norwalk, Connecticut is divided just about in half. The municipal side was up in three days after Irene (or Sandy?) while the investor owned side was two weeks. There's several rural Massachusetts towns I know that have municipal systems that perform similarly -- so it's not just a "rural/urban" issue and the investor owned is busy fixing rural towns. Best I can figure, the municipals are smaller with fewer employees -- but have more employees per customer so they can respond to trouble calls and new service requests on a timely basis with their smaller staffs. When they're not responding to customer issues, the linemen keep busy updating stuff like replacing old cross arms and such. Eversource (the one I'm most familiar with) seems to really like their contractors, and keep their own linemen spread thin. They have been putting a lot of contractors into improving grid reliability against regular storms but that doesn't do that much when you're about to have a lot more damage to the grid than the ordinary wind storm. My own house is very reliable -- out of power for more than 8 hours twice in 22 years; once for Irene then for Isasis and that last one I was actually a victim of the grid improvements; they built a new second feed into the center of my town so they didn't have to fix the older main distribution lines in front of my house first before the rest of town.

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