At the height of the storm, with winds and rain howling outside, when most people were holed up inside their houses, the utility crews were out working. (Many trucks drove past my house.)
And they have been working round the clock ever since, slowly restoring power, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood. Last night one of the neighborhoods in my town had their powere flip back on at about 3 AM, and this means that some hardworking crew was out in the dark at 3 AM, working on the power lines.
And it’s a thankless job. Look at some online blogs and you see all sorts of complaints from people whose power has not yet been restored.
Rescue workers work hard during these crises and this is not to take away from the value of their work. But ISTM that the utility workers are the unheralded heroes.
My FIL is a lineman, and in lesser emergency situations than these he gets paid A LOT. As he likes to say, “I got paid to work 36 hours in one day.” His work is hard and does suck, but for that kind of money… One year he was sent to Puerto Rico for 3 weeks and made over $100,000.
We were 2 months without power after a big hurricane and finally saw the crew starting down our block late one afternoon. We had cold beer waiting for them when they hooked us up.
Being without power sucks. Being without running water is MUCH worse.
My area of the country gets an ice storm every couple years that takes a week’s work (or more) to fix. We <3 our power crews. And our non-local crews, too - the last time our power came back online after a long outage, it was done by a crew from a state halfway across the country that had driven for 30 hours to come pitch in. No kidding.
I remember after Wilma…when 98% of Broward County was without power…the utility trucks from all over the east coast. They were such a welcome sight. Thankfully, we haven’t needed them down here recently, but I’m still a big fan of those who help bring normalcy back.