Open Thread - 07-12-24 - Hurricane Cleanup Edition
We get settled into our lives and the need for electricity is taken for granted. Until it's not.
This was my first hurricane. It made landfall about 150 miles south of us as a Cat. 1, but soon after was downgraded to a tropical storm. To be honest I had lived through stronger storms back in Illinois, but this tropical storm devastated a huge swath of southeast Texas as it made its way northward. The big problem was downed and uprooted trees that caused havoc across the region.
We've all lived through relatively short times of no power to our homes, usually resolved within a few hours, but one really gets an appreciation for the extent that our lives depend on electricity when it's lost for several days. Cooking, temperature control, gasoline availability, the loss of refrigeration and a whole assortment of every day mundanities become front and center when one suddenly finds oneself back in the 1800s.
Our power to the house went out last Monday, we're hoping upon hope that it's restored today, Friday. If so, it will be 5 days without the pleasantries of life that are so common that it gets pushed back in our everyday thoughts. It didn't take long for the grocery store to be overwhelmed. There were long lines waiting to gas up. The Texas heat had to be dealt with without air conditioning. The landscape looked like a war zone. The population of this small town took it in stride, but I got a real sense of how easily civilization could break down in an extended crisis.
I've been busy, too busy, since the storm, cleaning up debris on two properties. Fortunately my wife's office power was restored a couple of days after the storm, but we spent a couple of brutal nights trying to sleep in the oven that Texas can be. After two days the meat in the freezer was starting to thaw, so I had to transfer a smaller freezer from our home to the office to save about a thousand dollars of meat.
Then came the cleanup of yard debris that I've been working on for the last two days. That's just debris at the office, I still need to clean up at the house. What a mess! The office has several pecan trees which are brittle and drop limbs and sticks at the slightest breeze, so you can just imagine what 50 to 60 mile an hour wind gusts will do.
The question everyone asks around here is how a tropical storm could cause this much damage, the winds were not really that great but it did massive damage to the electrical infrastructure. I've talked to locals, many of them oldtimers, that have lived through past hurricanes, some much more powerful than this tropical storm, and they wonder how this breakdown could have happened. A house wouldn't have power and another house right next door would still be lit up. "How could that be", I heard over and over.
The big question folks had was, if a tropical storm can cause this much damage what's going to happen if a Cat. 5 blows through? This is supposed to be a higher than normal year for hurricanes. I sure hope that that Cat. 5 doesn't happen. I don't want to find out.
Comments
Good morning Free Rangers...
It's early Friday morning as I type this out on my wife's secretaries computer. She'll be in shortly so I have to hurry to publish this piece. I have to get back to the yard clean up, thankfully it will be a little cooler today. I may not be able to respond to any comments but I'll try.
Hopefully our power to the house will be restored today so life can get back to normal. If so, I'll catch up later.
The Texas state power grid
is unique in its fragility. The Texas power authorities (amusingly named the Energy Reliability Council) wanted to basically be independent of the grid for the rest of the country for reasons, and as a result some of the ability to wheel power in from utilities in adjacent states is more limited than in many other places- there are very few interties. A few good whacks in the right places can really hamstring the state, as you've seen.
I'm not convinced that that was the right way to plan power distribution infrastructure, but I wasn't asked. Nor was anyone else, to the best of my knowledge. This isn't the first time that the Texas state grid has taken a pounding, and won't be the last.
It really does bear out how fragile the entire national grid really is, at this point. The massive heat wave will stress the grid harder than it has ever been stressed, what with the additional loads from electric vehicle charging, data centers (looking at you, bitcoin miners!), and HVAC demands for homes and businesses.
Some amusing resources to watch for further information on this are at https://www.gridstatus.io/ and https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electric_overview/.... It's going to be a long, hot summer- especially given how many mortal enemies the US has created over the past couple generations. The "few good whacks" apply to the country as a whole, as well, and the Bad Guys (whoever they are this week) know it...
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
You allude to something...
that I've thought about since the onset of the electric problems, a cyber attack. What a perfect time for a hacker, hacker group, or a foreign state adversary to test out the integrity of the Texas grid, under the guise of a hurricane.
Add exponential population growth to the woes of the Texas grid as well. And you're right on about the strain that bitcoin mining puts on electric grids in this country and around the world.
True.
There’s a big data center that is moving into a sizeable warehouse property not far from my work. As part of that, they installed three large diesel backup generators. As in, 5MW-class gennies, plus fuel tankage to run them for several (many!) weeks. Lots of cooling towers…
There are no signs indicating who is running it- but there are lots of semis unloading full trailers of gear into it 24/7. I can only imagine that they are thousands of such sites under construction or recently completed, especially around these telecom-heavy locations with lots of empty commercial real estate.
They ought to do a grow operation in there, to use all that waste heat to (legally, it’s CO) grow weed…
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
that is a helluva environmental cost for data
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Hog the resources so humans pay more for dwindling access.
The machines taking over our lives. Damn crazy.
When we had the ranch,
I installed a 30KW diesel gennie with an automatic transfer switch that would power the house, the barn, and mostly the well pump so that we and the critters would have water, even if there was 4 feet of snow on the ground. It was nice- the lights would go out, the gennie would fire up, and it’d keep running until the power was restored. The day tank would hold it up for 48 hours, and right next to it we had the 500 gallon tank for dyed ag diesel for the tractor (dyed is no-road-tax fuel, therefore vastly cheaper). I could just pump it directly into the day tank. We could have gone for quite a while, if we’d needed to. Maintenance was straightforward. It was worth it. I was sad to have to walk away from it.
The tankage at that data center looks like it is on the order of 50-100K gallons. They look like the storage tanks at a friggin’ refinery. Dunno exactly what they are planning for, but it ain’t nohow trivial…
Now, I just watch the would do its thing without a thought of planning around it.
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
As to why one house will have power and another not,
it can depend on which way the power wires come in. Way back when I lived in a coastal city that got a near-miss from a small hurricane, every other house on the street pulled from the front and had power back within 24-48 hours, but the one I lived in pulled from a side street and no one noticed (until I went out about day 5 and spotted and reported the downed line). Not fun.
There is no justice. There can be no peace.
That's a very strong possibility...
it wasn't only individual houses but whole blocks that were lit up while an adjacent block was down, could be for the same reason.
It was the long time residents that have been through several hurricanes that thought it weird, but I've only lived in Texas for four years, so I don't have a history from which to judge.
Good morning JtC. We've had some extended outages
over the past few years. Luckily we had a small Honda generator (1500?) that we used to take along when we were out camping in the trailer. We used it when dry camping to keep the batteries topped up so that the water pump and furnace fan would work. Anyway, we'd drag it out and run it 1 hour with the fridge plugged in and another hour with the freezer plugged in and that was enough to keep stuff from spoiling it we opened the doors as little as possible. Beyond that, we'd just do without electricity and electrical goodies. It sucked.
be well and have a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
It sucks is right...
we discussed getting a Generac, but decided not to.
Wifey's office is on a grid with the county courthouse which is only a block away. Due to Homeland Security regulations or some such, the courthouse is supposed to never lose power, how that's accomplished I don't know. But I do know that the special grid that the courthouse is on went down as well in this tropical storm, not even a hurricane. That's not supposed to happen, that's one of the very weird things about this power outage.
Since her office is on the same grid as the courthouse the power to it should not have failed as well. But it did with no explanation so far. Even the county judge was stumped. Her office and the county courthouse has stayed lit up through many bad storms including Hurricane Harvey, which was a particularly bad one that flooded Houston and devastated southeast Texas. But it went down for a rather innocuous tropical storm? Go figure.
So, with all that in mind I recommended that we not get a generator because we could easily go to her office if we had to, which is only a couple miles away, where power was supposed to be guaranteed. But it didn't happen that way.
Now that we know that it is possible for the courthouse and office grid to fail, we are now discussing a gasoline/propane generator large enough to power the house.
power loss around here is so common
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it's no big deal anymore
2 gensets, one big and one small
big one runs the whole house - 6500 watts
little one is a suitcase - 1000 watts, portable
actually an inverter - kinder to sensitive electronics
need the big one to run the 220 volt well pump
good luck!
I hear ya'...
see my reply to Mr. lutris right above this one.
Suckage on
the no power worse on
the widespread devastation
condolences
some years pge has to shut down
for fire reasons once was
three days
ice storm ‘98 northeast
grid was out for twenty three days
straight in winter not so bad if
ya got your eight cord in by July
Q knows
a friend knew the.brother of
a rental shop manager local
got the last six k genny the
night the storm hit-lucky and good
Good Luck Hoss
careful of the hazards on cleanup
no sense making it through the storm
and get f@cked up on recovery
Ya got to be a Spirit, cain't be no Ghost. . .
Explain Bldg #7. . . still waiting. . .
If you’ve ever wondered whether you would have complied in 1930’s Germany,
Now you know. . .
sign at protest march
Yeah, every region...
has its downsides. I made it through the bitter cold, floods and tornadoes in Illinois, now I have to adapt to Texas' downsides.
I finished the clean up at the office today, I'm taking the weekend off and starting the house next week.
Thanks for the good luck sentiment, they still haven't powered up the house yet. There are plenty of line trucks all over the area, many that have pitched in from adjacent states, but living out in the country means you are low priority.
Oh well, at least we have the office to go to, many folks don't have that option and are struggling.
I've been trying to load a comment
on here, and am getting kicked off. It has some helpful Hurricane info on it as I'm a veteran of these storms. What gives?
Inner and Outer Space: the Final Frontiers.
site seems workable here
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maybe your browser?
contact customer service at
1-800-get-fked
@QMS Very agile, Howie, on
Very agile, Howie, on that 800 number. Hope you're being snarky. No, the problem is not at my end nor is it moderation. It's a tech gremlin.
Inner and Outer Space: the Final Frontiers.
@orlbucfan You notice I'm not
You notice I'm not having problems now? It's a tech gremlin. They are a PITA when you're not a tech geek.
Inner and Outer Space: the Final Frontiers.
glad you sauced it out
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the snark came in because of previous experiences in this realm
call your provider, they blame it on your hardware
troubleshoot the hard/soft ware and the finger goes back to the
provider, then the provider blames it on interconnect or Putin
Well, speaking of the devil.
caucus99percent
free-range politics, organic community
Error
The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later.
Inner and Outer Space: the Final Frontiers.
If you get booted while logged in...
it's usually a cookie problem. If you reboot your browser or delete your cookies, that should help.
Years ago, after I first moved up to the PacNW
There was a huge power outage. It was after a very bad windstorm soon after Clinton was inaugerated. The 'presidential' windstorm. Because America is... well, America, and we were in a rural area, the power went out. Expected. What wasn't expected was that the power was out for about 2 or 3 weeks. Why? Because the grid elements were so old they didn't make them anymore anywhere in the 'free' world so they couldn't replace the broken elements (transformers, etc). They had to be acquired from Russia!!!!
It sucked having no electricity, the worst part was no water from the well, to tell the truth. But, the community came together. I had no power but my grandparents did. So I would drive 20 miles one way to get a shower and a couple bottles of water. People with electricity made food for people without power. And, the electric company decided to upgrade everything. Heh.
Hope you get power back right away! Hot weather, without power, yeck. Cold weather without power sucks too, but not like that.
If you're poor now, my friend, then you'll stay poor.
These days, only the rich get given more. -- Martial book 5:81, c. AD 100 or so
Nothing ever changes -- Sima, c. AD 2020 or so
Russia!...
Putin's behind it for sure.
Two or three weeks without electricity, wow!
It strengthens the faith in mankind when people come together during adversity. I saw it here and back in Illinois after a really bad tornado. I also saw small bits of bad behavior as well, but that's human nature. The good always outweighs the bad, in the short term anyway. A breakdown in society may be a different story, I hope to never have to experience that.
A report from a fly on the wall.
Hah!
That's perfect.
The blizzard of '92
knocked out power here for two to three weeks.
Luckily I have a generator. The main issue is the well..no electricity, no water. I would hook up the generator to the well power for a couple of hours so we could cook, shower, and fill jugs. Having propane to heat and to run the stove made it easier for us than most.
These new battery generators are worthwhile and should be considered for those who can afford them. Jackery, Bluetti, Delta pro are examples. We have a small unit we use for camping and to power the camphouse...light and easy to tote.
Sorry about the storm issues. Best of luck with you clean up and power restoration. Nothing like being without to make you appreciate having electricity.
Take care friends!
“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
I just took a ride...
to the house and the utility trucks were right across the road from our house. I think we're going to get lit up this afternoon! Which also means that we'll be getting lit up tonight in celebration, if you know what I mean.
Yeehaw!!...Oh, and Prost!