HI, fellow Kossacks:
Since my last post Thursday night, when I thought we'd be ok, it's been a very difficult experience. I was WAY overly optimistic.
As it turns out, we live in one of the harder-hit areas of suburban Seattle. Consequently, we have not had electricity since 1am Friday morning. We still don't...this post comes courtesy of a hotel room with ethernet access, which we've reserved until Thursday morning.
Yeah, Thursday.
Friday, Old Abe and I stayed home from work, since not only did we lack hot water for showers, but also had a good 25-foot section of the top of our tallest fir tree come down onto our neighbor's fence, shattering about ten feet of it. We walked around the neighborhood and saw literally dozens of trees down, some on or through rooftops, others crushing or impaling cars. Within hours, we decided that we needed to find alternative lodging and managed to find a hotel room for the night an hour and a half north of Seattle.
Saturday morning we called a grocery store a few blocks from our house and, VOILA! They had POWER! We were surprised, but decided to return home. Bad move. The high tension lines that run on the street parallel to ours were wrapped like loose spaghetti around trees and utility poles over a span of several blocks. As of an hour or so ago when we left home, nothing had been touched by power crews.
We managed to get Old Abe's 6500 watt generator fired up yesterday afternoon, but the nearby gas stations had lines several blocks long, and eventually ran out of gas. As such, we only had about eight gallons to use, which got us through the night and into the morning with space heaters and the coffee maker this morning. The tap water was ice cold (it is barely around freezing outside right now), so I ran water through the coffee maker to wash my face and hands this morning.
Local restaurants are running out of food and have waits of up to forty five minutes to fill orders. And people linger in stores, coffee shops and gas station mini markets because it's warmer there than in their homes.
The situation became untenable when I realized that the fireplace wasn't drawing very well, and the entire house smells like it burned down. Everything is filthy, cold, and stinky. We gave up after breakfast and managed to nail down a hotel room.
The funny (or maybe not) part about all of this is that the only place you seem to hear about what's really going on is on the radio, where callers to radio stations beg for electricity, gasoline, food and warmth. The television stations keep saying the power is coming back, but other than large chunks of the city where power was relatively easy to turn back on, there doesn't seem to have been much progress these last eighteen hours or so. Don't misunderstand me....I know the power crews are working at top speeds, some of them forty hours at a stretch before earning an eight hour break. But there is a huge human toll being exacted up here, and not many people know about it.
I would bet there are thousands of homes with huge trees cutting them in pieces. I would bet there are thousands of elderly and disabled folks who are living on crackers and water, shivering in overnight temperatures in the low and mid 20's. I would bet there are thousands of children who are tired, cold, hungry, and wanting nothing more than a hot bath and a warm bed. All for want of gas for their cars and money for hotel rooms.
I know it's not Katrina. But please keep your shivering Pacific Northwestern friends in your thoughts and/or prayers in the coming days. We're the lucky ones.