Okay, it's true that the recent wind storm called a 'dehrico' that struck the east coast of the US was an unusual event. But there seem to have been a lot of 'unusual' weather events lately.
We were heavily impacted by the October snowstorm of 2011 that struck with leaves still on the trees dragging down a lot of trees and branches leaving us without power for 5 days. And were without power on three other occasions in 2011 for a total of 12 days, and so far we are up to 2 events here on my own homestead so far in 2012 totaling about 7 hours.
The basic theme is that my local power company has been skimping on basic maintenance such as trimming tree limbs and replacing transformers preemptively, and only replacing the wooden telephone poles whenever they fall down.
I can't speak for the maintenance schedules in other parts of the country but some of them seem to be experiencing a similar dynamic where the power companies are skimping on maintenance in preference to fixing the outages once they have occurred.
Perhaps it’s just a run of bad weather, or it’s the outcome of US-style utility profit & loss management or both, but I think it’s a trend that deserves observing both because we can take personal steps towards minimizing our exposure to electrical company follies.
The Storm
A band of thunderstorms formed just outside of Chicago early on the morning of Friday June 29. By 2:00 p.m. the thunderstorms had formed into something called a derecho and then proceeded to plow east.
