I was in the field of the big Midwestern derecho on Monday, and most of my city was without power at some point. Other towns have been stricken even worse, due to all the high winds (up to 100mph) and downed trees and power lines.
I live in a large apartment complex, and found out from a tenant in another building today that when she called the rental office about an unrelated issue, they hadn’t even called the electrical company for their own building, and the utility said that several buildings in the complex were not contacted by anybody regarding the outage, so they didn’t even know about it! It certainly wasn’t mine, because I definitely let them know (as soon as I could get through, that is; that took a while).
So, just call. Even if everyone else has called, they will know that YOU need their services, and there’s no other way for them to find out. They don’t have ESP or osmosis.
If I call PG&E’s regular customer service line, the first option is “if you’re calling to report an outage, press 1”. If I do so, it tells me my address (since I’m on file) and asks if this is where the outage is, press 1. I press 1, it tells me if it’s been reported* and status, which is usually something like “crews are on the way” or “crews are onsite, expected power restoration in x hours [or] minutes”.
*And yes, it’s surprising how often I’m the first to report an outage, OP.
My power company has an outage map on their web site, including the mobile version. So the first thing I do if my power goes out is check that. If it already shows an outage for my area, I know they are already aware of it. If not, then I report it, which can be done on their mobile web site as well.
They’ll also robocall me with a message “There is an outage in your area. We expect power to be restored in X minutes/hours”. Then when they think it’s restored, I get another call: “Power in your area has been restored. If your power is still off, please press 1.”
When I was a kid, we used to have power outages all the time, two or three times a year, because we lived out in the country and the technology we were all using out there was antiquated and falling apart. Whenever it happened, we all assumed someone was looking into it.
Until one day it didn’t seem to change for a long time. No fixes, no trucks anywhere. And then we noticed the neighbours all had their lights on while we didn’t.
Turned out the problem was on our own property. The cable connecting to our house had shorted at the pole. We spent a day and a half suffering in the dark and cold, and nobody else knew.
Mid American, my local electric company, often says things like “We are experiencing heavy call volume” or “We are aware of an outage in your area, and the time to restoration of services is XYZ.” Of course, that didn’t happen this time around for the first few hours, because I got a busy signal.
One of the staples of American Society has been the fact that our landline telephones have their own power supplies that come from the Phone Company. So even if you have an electrical power failure, even if it’s widespread, your telephone almost certainly still works.
AT&T, with their UVerse phone protocol, trashed all that. If you have UVerse service, your phone is driven via a modem that needs power from your regular electric service. If that goes out, your phone goes out. OTOH, with nearly everyone having a mobile phone, you still have that to work with when the power dies.
Couldn’t do that in my area this week - the power company’s website crashed. Of course, getting through by phone was sort of unlikely, too. Just too many customers for the system to handle. Turned into an unintentional denial of service attack. Of course, keep trying, eventually you’ll get through.
It’s not just AT&T. Nearly every cable company offers the same VOIP service. You can also buy inexpensive LAN<->POTS adapters that give unlimited VOIP service for a couple bucks per month.
In a power outage, cellphone service is likely to last for a couple days before the cell towers’ on-site backup generators run out of fuel. Depending on what caused the power outage and how widespread it is, getting all the cell towers refueled can be almost as big a project as fixing the electric power supply.
Even with a true landline, the phone company’s power supply was meaningless if your only home phone was cordless (as it was for me after an ice storm in 2004).
We still have a landline, for several reasons, including the fact that cellular coverage in our area stinks (AT&T gave us a microcell booster years ago, but when the power or internet goes out, that does, too). We’ve kept two “wired” phones in the house, in part in case of power outages.
I got pissed when I discovered during a power outage my “landline” actually wasn’t a landline anymore. I asked about getting a real landline and the price quoted was double my then-current AT&T bill!
AT&T does not seem to want to supply actual landlines anymore…