The storm last night blew out the lights while I was reading, so I reached for my LED head lamp to continue. Why should I stop reading a good book just because the power was out and there were loud booming noises. About 10 minutes later, the lights came back on. Good times. All the electric clocks need to be reset, but that's not a huge big deal. What convenient utilities of life and civilization do you own that work without electricity? The toilet does. So do the faucets. If you own a mechanical clock, or one with batteries, that's fine. If you have a gas stove and a fire lighter, you're still set there, though the oven might be more tricky. Your fridge dies, unfortunately, and too long off and the frozen food is ruined. Your water heater can't turn on without power, even if it runs on gas, because the controls are electric. Your cellphone works till the charge dies, then its a dead weight covered in fingerprints and scratches. Your library of books are fine, unless they're electric books that are accessed by wifi connected to The Cloud, which is down with the grid.
I mention the Grid specifically because ever since the business with Chromium 6 poisoning in Hemet by PG&E, and the billion dollar lawsuit, public utilities have stopped improving the grid. Before that, they worked for the public good, pretty much. After that? They were public enemies so show em what its like to be without power, lah di dah. So the grid isn't getting maintenance anymore, and it goes down, and they sometimes wait a little while before putting it back up. Around here, where trees and bad storms drop branches onto poles, this results in folks living up those scenic forested roads to go without power for days or weeks sometimes, due to weather. One hears about which brand of generator is best because they run them enough that they can wear out. Honda generators are most reliable, btw. In case you wondered. You have to turn off the mains before you turn on the generator, although I expect you can get the mains wired with a special switch that tells your generator to turn on or off rather than doing it yourself in the dark. Ergo the value of an LED headlamp. Its up there with a pocket knife to slit those annoying plastic package box tapes or bags of screws. If you can operated a Phillips #2 screwdriver you know what I'm talking about. If you can't, well, thank you for reading my blog. It must be very mysterious.
I live in a suburban neighborhood, complete with fully paved streets and sidewalks, which is unusual up here. Most of the streets outside this fanciful neighborhood with higher standards, are not fully paved, don't often have sidewalks, and frequently are overgrown on both sides. Some of the trees in this neighborhood are tall enough to be hit by lightning, and one of those hit was taken down about a month ago. A local service hires a 100 foot high crane to lift the logs over houses after being cut from the top down. Pretty amazing thing to see. This neighborhood has wide paved streets so fires are easy to put out and don't spread. A neighborhood just down the hill, is the opposite. Full of mansions and heavily treed and full of brush, their wildfire insurance rates much be horrific. They're the worst sort of location to be a serious fire: bottom of a canyon, single narrow treed road out, and asking for it. I imagine those houses will burn when the time comes. And it always does. Fire is natural in the Foothills.
Anyway, we had a thunder storm a week ago too, and that was also something interesting. In my youth, thunderstorms were rare, but that was because I lived near the coast. You need flatland to get the right charge differential for a thunder cloud. We don't usually get that here. The Valley isn't quite wide enough. But if we get the storm started, its not too uncommon to get dry lightning in the upper sierras, which is one of the reasons so much of our taxes go to fire spotting and fire fighting. It really matters up there. Down here, in the foothills we have dense brush that burns nastily in fires, and can go on for weeks. The American Canyon Fire was 3-4 weeks long, last summer. Lots of fire plane tankers. Hard to put out. Many more fires like that will happen in the future until such time as funding and manpower are applied to ripping out the manzanita under all the oak trees, and clearing the ground so fires have nowhere to go, nothing to burn. Sounds a lot like work, so it doesn't happen. Only a small cadre of truly dedicated men at CalFire and Department of Forestry care before the sparks start flying. They remember the big fires and know how hard it is to stop them. They have the most to lose. With all the rain last night, there were no fires. In the summer, when lightning barely gets drops of rain? A 45 minute series of flashes and booms would have been followed by sirens, and at dawn, fire planes and spotters sent to try and put out the bad parts of the fire. That's life in the foothills.
People pay extra for houses surrounded by things that catch fire, but you're living with nature. That means black bears sort through your garbage and eat the cat, and your dog vanishes when the coyotes come through because coyotes get hungry too. And the power can go out for days anytime there's a storm, but at least you aren't getting mugged by angry lowlanders on drugs who hate you for your skin color or being clean or not smelling as bad as they do. Funny how folk overlook those details for basic standards of living. We'll put up with fires to have a peaceful BBQ not punctuated by gunfire, and there's no crack vials in our gutters. We have tradeoffs and we pay for that security.
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