I’m angrier than a hogtied cat next to a fish tank over this next story, mostly because I was affected by what happened on Saturday night. You see, there was a slight snow storm over the weekend that overpowered National Grid’s transmission lines.
Sure, there was a lot of heavy snow and trees falling everywhere, but National Grid, the local power company, couldn’t keep the lights on. Thousands upon thousands lost their power. I was one of them. My power was out for five inexcusable hours. Five!
Apparently, I got off light. There are people who were without power this morning. The lines are being fixed. Over 12,000 were still without power as of early this morning, down from the 80,000 in the dark on Saturday night. My power went out at about 4:20 p.m. and came back on at 9:41 p.m. That’s over five hours, folks. There’s no excuse for it.
To be fair, things were rough. A CDTA bus was stuck in the snow two blocks from my home, for example.
There’s absolutely no excuse for the power to be out for two days for many and several hours for others such as myself.
National Grid said that they’re trying to restore power but may not be able to do so until later tonight, or maybe into Tuesday. This, when over 3,000 workers from all over the region came to the Albany area to restore power. Again, National Grid has no excuse for the power outages. None whatsoever.
The damage could have been a lost worse for me and people like me, I suppose. Since the power went off, of course, I could not access the internet on either of my computers. I had to rely on cell phone towers, but the signal was almost non-existent, probably because something went wrong with the diesel backup generators at various cell phone towers.
I was barely able to play Words With Friends and it was a miracle that I was able to stream entertainment. My food almost went bad in my fridge and freezer because of the loss of power, but thankfully, the food survived.
That would have been over $200 in damaged goods.
And I would have been National Grid’s innocent victim, even more than I already was. For example, I was unable to do my homework for five hours, which meant doing it on Sunday just to catch up. I could have been adversely affected academically as well and I am not going to stand idle and let National Grid victimize me there as well.
But there was some good news, I suppose. Church was canceled, and that gave me two additional hours of sleep. So there’s that.
I suppose that I should be grateful that I was only down for five hours. Some people are still without power even as I type this at almost 2:30 in the afternoon. And they might not be back up until later tonight. But the power should never have gone down in the first place. National Grid has no excuse, especially considering the fact that they’re still not done with restoration.
Shame on you, National Grid! Do better!