The National Weather Service has issued an ICE STORM WARNING! for the St Louis area through midnight Sunday. :eek:
As so the fateful countdown begins for literally hundreds of thousands of customers of Ameren Useless Electric Company . St Louisans are getting pretty used to 3rd world power service. :mad: They have visited the Schnuck’s panic aisle, found their flash lights, prepared the generators.
I am expecting my power to go out any moment now, and probably not come back for several days at least. This after being without power for 8 days last summer after the “storm of the century”. Then another 5 days in December after another “storm of the century.” Poorly maintained infrastructure and untrimmed powerline easements; sometimes one might think we’re in Baghdad.
It is 32 degrees in St Ann right now, and the trees are begining to acquire what some might view as a beautiful icy coating. Well, at least the wind is fairly calm right now.
I walked outside and grabbed one of the branches on my already iced over tree, and when I gave a slight tug about three feet snapped off in my hand.
The really bad part is we’re about two hours into a what they’re saying is a 48 ice hour storm.
This could suck.
Wow, again? We lived in STL for about 4 years (U City) - my son was born at Jewish hospital. I remember St. Louis weather as the worst- hot hot summers and icy bitter winters.
We rushed my son to hospital when he was about 9 mos old with a very high fever and it -20F with the wind and the car doors were iced shut. The weather really could suck.
Yeah, Kirkwood and Webster Groves and all the other cities with lots 'o old trees are pretty much screwed every time there’s an excuse for Ameren to blame the weather for their failings.
I’m in Fenton; got an outage in the summer, but not the last ice storm. We’ll see… still only rain here.
For me, the really enjoyable part is going to be when Ameren uses yet another failure to provide service on their part as a reason to cram a rate hike down our throats (like they did in IL).
It’s still just rain here, though it’s likely to turn into ice soon. I really hope this doesn’t turn into yet another power outage, as the last week-long one was quite enough for me. Our best hope is that all the branches that took out the power lines fell during the previous storm.
And all this after three fabulous days with no plumbing. Not to mention the outage in August, plus the stray bolt of lightning which fried my motherboard and the answering machine and the TV set.
Here in Lake St. Louis there is nothing going on. The streets are wet but not icy. Driving would be normal. There is 3/16" of ice w/ a smidgen of sleet on top of it on my deck. A few tree limbs are down.
The Weather Channel radar seems to say we’re done for most of the rest of the day. BFD. By my (non-expert) reading of the tea leaves, tomorrow (Sun) will probably be a fizzle too.
As to Ameren, the problem is 100% that nobody here in MO seems to understand that spending an extra few bucks one time to bury all the wires will solve the problem. But NOOOO every tjime that is proposed, the hue & cry goes up that it might increase rates to pay for the investment. Hello, how much does it cost for $500K people to lose power every few months?
Were I live now we have 100% buried utilities & never have a problem.
When I was growing up in SoCal in the 60s/70s they passed a law to require all new installations to be underground and to require the utility to bury 100% of the existing infrastructure within 10 years. The goal was to earthquake-proof the wiring plant. (perhaps surprisingly, wiring survives an earthquake a lot better underground than it does on top of tall flimsy poles with heavy trasnformers bolted on top.)
It cost the typical homeowner a few hundred bucks over the decade. Power outages were a thing of the past. And you’d be amazed at how much nicer everything looks without that forest of poles and wires you’re used to looking past to see the world around you.
My bottom line: Ameren isn’t the problem. Shortsighted muleish Missouri attitudes are the problem. (And no, I don’t work for, or own stock in, Ameren)
The problem is, all us shortsighted muelish Missourians are too damn familiar with how Ameren works. A rate hike to bury the lines would become a permanent rate hike that’d pay for nothing but excuses as to why the lines haven’t been buried yet. Making it a matter of law for Ameren to comply would probably be successful, but there’s no way that’ll get past the legislators who’ve shown no willingness to reign Ameren in.
Tellingly, IL just got an Ameren rate hike forced upon them, and southern Illinois has had even worse experience with Ameren’s power outages, and Ameren has on plans to improve upon that despite the rate hike.
But, yeah, this ice storm o’ doom is definately a non-starter.
I came back to the thread to say I may have spoken too soon. At 10am the radar animations showed everything passing south of STL. Now at 2:15 I’m not so sure we won’t get hit again at dusk & on through the evening. I was just out for a couple of hours & there are a lot of trees throughout the county that aren’t broken yet, but are carying darn close to their max load of ice. A second round as good as we’ve already gotten will cost a lot of limbs & a few trunks.
As to Ameren, I’ve lived in the STL area 12 years now after living all over the place for many years. The key to any utility stuff is to have a PSC that thinks. Not one that is owned by the short-term populist politicians, nor owned by the shorter-term utility execs with bonuses tied to last week’s profits.
I do agree that it seems the MO PSC is unwilling to either hold Ameren’s feet to the fire, or to do anything that’d piss off the consumers for 10 minutes. The sum of that is mindless drift & recurrent disaster-scale power failures.
I awakened at 2 am to a darkened alarm clock. AmerenUseless Electric’s My Outage Yet Still Again is pretty well useless, about as useless as the State Legislature, the PSC and Missouri’s teen governor
Burying lines in relatively new and new suburbs is a great idea LSL. But what do we do about more mature suburbs? I would write a check for $200 to bury the power lines right now, and so would most of my neighbors- I would hope.
My point exactly. It would not cost more than $1000 per hosehold to bury 100% of the EXISTING lines in greater St. Louis. It might take a decade to complete the work, but if we start this spring we’ll be making progress each year. If we put it off another 5 years, well, we’ll be having the same conversation 5 years from now. And I really don’t think there’s anybody so poor that they can’t come up with $100/year paid out over 10 years to pay for their share. The really poor tend to live in higher density housing (apt buildings, etc), which also mean more people to share the cost with. This isn’t hard.
Thoughout the City, to the inner burbs, the 170 ring, Kirkwood, Webster, all the way out to the farmland, etc., burying lines is 100% doable; we simply lack the will to do so. As I said in my first post, I lived through burying all the lines in a county with over a million residents living in existing housing with overhead wires. It can be done.
Our electric went out for about 90 seconds tonite, leading me to track down our ‘Ameren Bin,’ chock full of lamps, candles, batteried radio, etc. It also lead to 07’s first ‘Ameren Rant’ from my wife, thankfully broken up by the electric kicking back in.
About twenty minutes after my last post we lost power. After working all day Saturday, and ten minutes after taking the coldest shower of my life our power zapped back on. I heard a range from 80,000 - 110,000 were without power.
Now to go help my neighbor dig out from under my tree.
Caseyville is about 10 minutes from downtown StL, but after bracing for the worst, all we got was rain. It never got below freezing all weekend and now it’s back up in the forties. Damn you, weather man, for getting me all excited for nothing!
P.S. Ameren can still kiss my ass.
