Uprooted
Hello world! This big boy fell out of the woods into the schoolyard during Ice Ice Baby. The part that landed in the schoolyard was already chainsawed up. I thought I heard chainsaws yesterday afternoon but couldn’t place where they were coming from.
The beach urchins were hunkered down at the city mouse’s house when the power went out. It came back on during the night but then went out again. So everybody ended up at The Landfill today. The city mouse was working (her office was also out), the country mouse and raccoon had the day off and were out gallivanting around.
One of the things that’s been going on in our largely liberal city is that the city council wants to outlaw natural gas connections in new construction. My position on this is complicated. I was long ago dubbed The Family Liberal (of the cFam) by another outlaw, The Beautiful Becky (she and I are largely on the same page). I am quite liberal in terms of politics and am not a climate change denier although I ALWAYS want to know what the “data” is and where it came from. Facts please. With the caveat that I don’t personally have the “chops” to understand and analyze the “data”.
But wait. I think we need to take a step back from getting rid of natural gas. It was cold during this storm and MANY people lost power (I have no idea why we didn’t). Those people are suffering. If you are all electric, you don’t likely have hot water and if you have a well, you don’t likely have ANY WATER. Hotels are full and not everyone can afford to relocate to one.
Clearly our city’s electrical grid is not terribly robust. I don’t think we should ban natural gas until we have beefed up our electrical grid (and other power sources). I don’t see any evidence that anyone is seriously thinking about this. If we want to do away with natural gas, let’s PLAN ahead and build a sturdy power infrastructure. Because this storm, although not the worst I’ve experienced, was a MESS!
February 24th, 2023 at 8:51 pm
As a fellow liberalish type, I agree with you on the gas.
February 25th, 2023 at 3:20 pm
I don’t care for the new DTE outage map either. And every area I clicked on said ‘95% back by Sunday’. The old version had specific timing for each area outage. Maybe they didn’t always meet that time, but you got a sense of where they were working/prioritizing.
The stop light at Main and Stadium was still out at noon today, along with several others.
I don’t blame the workers – this was widespread and so many branches/trees down on lines, so really hard to be everywhere all at once. They’re just doing their job.
But yeah – that website….