Green Mountains Go Black

With wind speeds of in excess of 143 mph (not a typo) and sustained wind clocked at over 70 mph, it's no surprise much of the Green Mountain state is in the dark tonight. Burlington went from a daytime high of 51 to a projected low of negative numbers tonight.

First time I've ever seen emergency shelters set up throughout more than a half dozen towns (although often fairly far flung; I think our closest is about 50 miles away). But that's also no surprise; many homes and businesses lost roofs and, without power, furnaces won't be running to heat those in the sub-zero cold. At last count, more than 30,000 homes were out and more expected to go dark overnight. For a state with just 660,000 people, that's a good-sized chunk with power outages, or more than 10% of all homes.

The "great" thing about Vermont power outages (and you have to realize that Vermont ranks dead last in affordable electricity in the nation; a big chunk of our lights come from either that dreadful Vermont Yankee Nuclear plant or Quebec) is that you can be out of electricity for days and, when you next get your bill, it will actually be higher than normal. The two late summer outages we had, where we were out for more than two days each, our bill was 15-25% bigger than normal. Verizon does about the same with phone service here.

Try getting them to explain it, however, and you're no longer a "co-op member" but an unpleasant customer they give the heave.

The better news is that the big power outage that hit the Northeast in 2004 did not kill us; we were spared because the part of Canada that supplies our power stayed on while tens of thousands of other Quebecois were out.