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....that 3,000,000 households -- primarily in Texas, Arkansas, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania -- are still without electricity since Saturday / Sunday?
Since the outages and damage are widespread and not concetrated in low-income area (and therefore, not 'newsworthy'), I'm guessing you didn't.
Carry on.
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Three million households are without power? Or three million people? Either way that's outrageous, and alarming. I haven't heard any news about this.
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Well, to tell you the truth Chris, I'm not sure if that's people or households, because national news agencies aren't reporting much on it....which was part of my point.
Local and regional news outlets are covering it, of course, but I was trying to get damage estimates today for the strom in total, but there is little to be found. It's focused on Houston / Galveston (and justifiably so), but as of this morning, there were still 350,000+ Duke Energy customers (households & businesses, not individual persons) still without power -- and Duke provides electric for just those affected in the Cincinnati-N. Kentucky-SE Indiana area. That estimate does not address other major areas of population like Louisville, Dayton, Columbus, Akron, Canton, Pittsburgh, and Texas / Arkansas, of course.
Ike converged with a frontal system here in the midwest and brought sustained hurricane-force winds to KY/OH/IN/PA. I, or anyone else in this region of the country for that matter, have never seen damage so widepread from a non-winter (wind) storm.
It was (is) surreal.
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The storm hit Western new york Sunday night. I lost power for a while. Wind gust hit over 50 mph. I can't imagine the strength of this storm when it hit Texas.
Ron
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That is pretty surprising, but if you consider the difficulties in restoring power following the Quebec ice storm, for example ... if you have damage on that kind of scale, it does make sense.
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Ice storms and big blizzards can cause massive prolonged outages, yes. Some get far worse than others, but it is not uncommon even here in the midwest US, and an event we all recognize as a possibility.
But this was very weird, and is truly unprecedented in this region of the county. This isn't a rash of tornadoes and springtime storm cells, which happens sometime every spring -- we're talking about September and the remnants of a tropical storm that re-organized inland and brought Cat. 1 hurricane-force winds (literally) clear up here into the Ohio Valley. We had 50-60 mph winds with gusts over 75 mph here in Cincy, and some nearby communities had gusts of 80+ mph. And it blew like that for 4 hours, not 30 minutes like a violent spring thunderstorm. I've never seen anything like it. And there was NO rain here -- the sun shone the entire time (northern IL and the Chicago got less wind but a lot of rain). I just stood on the porch and marveled at the awe-striking sight and sound of the wind, bending trees over and breaking them into bits....all afternoon long. Hour by hour, I wondered if it would ever end -- I began to wonder how many hours of sustained winds could be withstood by buildings and other structures.....
To put it in perspective, the energy company never experienced higher percentages of outages in this region. I believe over 90% of Duke's customers lost power.
And like Ron said - just think of what it was like in TX! It is a bigger mess and more chaotic in Houston, for sure....
It just seems to me that while as many people aren't dead, hurt, or stranded as a disaster like Katrina, for example (which is far more serious and important and concerning, I realize), the total damage this storm in dollars has to be absolutely enormous, and I just don't quite understand why it seems to be back-page news?
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Damn - what are the odds of all the houses being swept away - and yours is left seemingly untouched by Ike:
![[Image: hurricane-ike-lone-house-02-420a091808.jpg]](http://o.aolcdn.com/dims-au/INTL/1/530/420/90/http://au-portal-origin.web.aol.com/au_gallery/i/h/hurricane_ike_lone_house_md_091808/hurricane-ike-lone-house-02-420a091808.jpg)
"We're forced to bed, but we're free to dream"
Dana
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^ The odds are pretty good if you know how to use photoshop.
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now theres a family who could go home and say that the neighborhood has gone to hell, and mean it
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