Comment by ghc
7 days ago
living in New England, I have also never heard of this and I don't think it's understandable at all. Trees are pruned around power lines for a reason.
7 days ago
living in New England, I have also never heard of this and I don't think it's understandable at all. Trees are pruned around power lines for a reason.
Multiple day outages in Winter are not unusual in our part of Maine. Nearly everyone has a whole home generator for good reason.
Live in ex-urban MA and it’s not common but have had a couple of multi-day power outages in both winter and summer over the decades I’ve lived here. Don’t remember the details of the summer outage but the winter one was a massive ice storm.
Sure, but that's not the same as losing power during the first snowstorm every year. The massive ice storm was back in 2010 IIRC.
The major ice storm I remember might have been 2012 or 2013. There was also a different snow storm (maybe that was 2010?) at the end of October when all the leaves were still on the trees. My parents lost power for something like 6 days (so much damage the crews were swamped). I had been visiting them, and gtfo as the snow was falling, and never lost power 2 hours away.
I think this comes back to the framing of the article, stated as universal truths when it's really just someone who was woefully unprepared for a snow storm and subsequent power outage. Life threatening and horribly inconvenient for them yes, but nowhere near a universal experience.
Prepare a few days ahead getting groceries, gas, etc. Make sure firewood totes are full. It starts snowing. Do a little shovel work to keep fire fed, if power goes out (rare, but always possible of course) a little more shovel work to set up generator. Wait for snow to stop, clean up with snowblower/tractor/shovels/etc, taking a variable number of sessions depending on how much snow fell.
The main lesson is "be prepared", not all the little things the author got surprised by due to a wholesale lack of preparation.
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Oof, you just reminded me of the Ice Storm of '98.
I can still hear all the trees just exploding. It was wild.
Couple of tail-ends of hurricanes in summer offlined a big chunk of Massachusetts when I was living there. Likely one of those?
come up to maine and see how much pruning the power companies do. there's a reason high wind and heavy snow storms trash power lines
As an adolescent in Fayette (Maine), I had great fun helping out our neighbors with summertime tree-pruning parties. FWIW we had few power issues during winter, and our winters frequently featured 4-6 feet of snow cover.