12/17/08;
Power is back on at home, the next question is for how long, last powerup only ran for about an hour before dying again…
I’m not holding my breath…
We WILL be contacting the State Utilities Commision over this, I want heads to roll! some CMP “Suits” need to lose their jobs over this, there are still over 3,000 customers without power in the York County area…
And the worst part is, CMP is a MONOPOLY, we have no other power companies to choose from…
I was just talking to a few people who are affected by this. They are still without power. One woman said that luckily she has a generator, and it has not yet been stolen. (Apparently that’s a real problem now.) They have to wait in a gas line every day to fill it with 20 gallons, and that only powers one room in the house.
There are also long lines at Dunkin’ Donuts. Nothing like a natural disaster to make people focus on life’s real priorities.
I have used this outage as a learning experience, I learned a great deal about the makeup of the grid, the order in which power is restored, the way CMP prioritizes repairs, what power pole circuit breakers look like, how to tell a tripped breaker from a functioning one, and also learned that we need to keep more than a cord of wood on hand, we also need to have multiple backup redundancies for our backup plans
We did well on the food, water, and lighting side
We did okay on the heating side, but we really need to have a lot more wood and/or firelogs on hand to be truly prepared
we absolutely failed on the electrical side, we should have at the very least, a small 8 KW generator to keep our oil furnace running, we can live without electricity for the conveniences like electric lights, TV, and the Internet, but since both our oil heat, propane heater, and water heater and water pump are electrically powered, we were forced to rely on our backup equipment, which we had just barely enough of
Going forward, we plan to;
1; keep a decent, if not excessive amount of wood on hand for use in the woodstove for supplimental heating, and in fact, the woodstove will now be used as a main part of our winter heating strategy even when we do have power, we’ll use the woodstove to reduce our reliance on fossil fuel heating
2; keep a good amount of water onhand in storage, we’ll re-use those 5 gallon water cooler jugs and keep them filled at all times, if the water isn’t potable, it can at least be used for flushing toilets
3; we will be seriously considering a professionally installed backup generator, powered by Propane, this will be used to run the oil furnace in winter outages, and the refrigerator during summer outages, the only drawback to the genny is it’s cost, as it would be an unplanned for expense
the biggest problem I had with CMP, and the reason for my irrational ranting, was their lack of communication and the poor/false info they were giving us, sadly, this is not a one time thing with them, our road has always recieved substandard-to-nonexistent support from CMP, I don’t like calling them, and I know they’re sick of talking to me, but it’s the only way to get any information from them and it’s the only way to let them know our power related problems
You’re right. They should have called you every day to give you the exact GPS locations of the trucks, and an exact, to the minute update of when your power will, 100% guaranteed, without fail, be restored. They should have had the supplies and manpower sitting idle to completely replace the entire grid overnight. :rolleyes: This is a storm of unprecedented magnitude.
I live in Sandown, and also lost power on Thursday night. Woodstoves, and a borrowed generator (from the FIL, who escaped to Florida for the winter… lucky bugger.) kept the house warm and the freezer & fridge cold until power was restored last night.
This is a widespread issue, with many workers coming in from far away places, working long hours. Unless you’re an electrical grid expert, you don’t have the expertise to say whether or not they are doing a good job at overall restoration.
I am grateful that I was restored as quickly as I was, but was prepared for a much longer outage, and would have figured something out if it had gone on beyond my stock of supplies.
IMO, your only legitimate complaint was the incorrect updates from your power company. PSNH was similarly poor with the details, but I’m going to forgive them, as they have much more important things to do than to get into that level of detail with customers. Power will be back when they get the power back. Quityerbitchin. You should feel lucky that you have power back this early, many of my co-workers who live in SW New Hampshire are being given repair estimate dates well into Jan 2009.
Actually, now looking at it impartially, the fact that CMP went from 230,000 homes without power at the beginning of the outage to now around 350 homes without power, mostly in York County, in 6 days is actually rather impressive, I still think communication with customers could have been better, but CMP actually didn’t do too badly overall, my ranting was due to being in a cold house (the sunroom with the woodstove, and to a lesser extent, the kitchen, were the only warm rooms in the house) with another storm looming
CMP is now sending crews to help out stricken locations in New Hampshire and Mass, so they do deserve praise for that, lets hope my fellow Northeast residents get their power and heat back on soon
and please, have an emergency situation plan, ours worked reasonably well, but there was definitely room for improvement…
Granted, butler1850, we can’t expect them to fix everything immediately when it’s this bad, but they need a better disaster plan. CMP did better than Unitil – who apparently outright lied to people in Stratham, and the National Guard had to be called in to help – but I think we can expect a little more. Population is only going to get denser, and there’s reason to expect more, and more violent, storms in future.
Shit, that means we can have an official DopeFest! Hi neighbor. (I can see the Chester line from my house!)
I got power back this afternoon. Six days later. Whew!
I think the things I would have liked from National Grid, on this side would have been:
A clear idea of when it was going back up. First they said Saturday, then Sunday, then kept delaying it.
An opportunity, before it happened, to have a different power company. NG is practically a monopoly, too.
Much better website updates. I did my best and did not call NG once. I know they are besieged with calls. But that means I really need the website to be reliable. Instead, I was forced to rely on my local newspaper, which I admit was VERY accurate and prompt.
UNITIL customer here in North Central Mass. They suck for many reasons, including the highest rates I’ve ever paid for electricity, lack of response, lack of system maintenance and lack of manpower to fix things after storms. Yes, this was a much worse storm than I’ve probably ever seen here in 17 years, but we lose our power frequently. This is the second time in 10 years that I’ve gone more than four days without power. We were without power from Thursday at 10:30pm until today at 1pm. Six excruciatingly long days. Our town was one of the hardest hit in Mass and it was a total mess, I will give them that. But half the town is still out - literally 50%- and there are very few trucks to be found working. We had ours connected today by a Raymond NH company that was subcontracted. Finally. At first, UNITIL apparently didn’t start calling in subcontractors. (Haven’t seen much news in 6 days, so I could be wrong, but I’ve heard it from several different town sources - -police and fire people.) Yah, they suck.
Five goddamn days without power. PSNH are a bunch of assholes, they said people should have “planned accordingly.” So… shouls have planned on them being massively incompetent? According to them they plan to let many poor folks continue on without power until Friday!
We need to cut more wood now. I mean, we cut a lot, but when you’re using that as your only source of heat for five days, you go through it a lot quicker than “hey, it’s kind of chilly, why don’t we have a fire tonight?” level of usage.
Regardless of who you purchased your power from (if there was a choice) there would still only be one distribution system. It wouldn’t make sense to have parallel electrical distribution systems serving the same area. Someone will always have the monopoly, even if it’s a local town owning the distribution system. (as it was in my hometown of Ipswich MA)
They have an unprecedented level of work to do. There is no way that they could have had the staff & equipment available to restore power in the time frames that everyone seems to think they should have. This is not an isolated problem, it’s spanning multiple states, and teams have been brought in from as far away as the mid-Atlantic states. What else do you want them to do?
For the record, there are folks out there that are in far worse shape than “Friday restoration.” Co-workers have been told to expect power sometime next month.
You can see the Chester line from the location in your profile?
About Olentzero
Location
Stockholm, Sweden
Of course, if you can see Chester, you’re way on the other side of town (not sure if we’re allowed to associate :D), but nice to see you neighbor!
*** disclaimer *** I do not work for PSNH, or any power company. I’m an IT guy, but did study high power distribution systems in college as part of my Electrical Engineering education, and have had to relocate a couple of network installations, on short notice, and can only extrapolate how big a job the electrical grid replacement would be.
Uh… I got good eyesight?
Actually I’m home with the folks for a few months while the Swedish government decides whether or not it’s gonna let me back in the country to live with my wife (the former Doper known as anniz) and get a job.
My sympathies go out to everyone still off the grid after this mess. I honestly wish there were something I could do.
Six and a half days after the power went out, it finally came back on, and I got to return home (waves to the fellow Rockingham Co. dopers). Although I’m as frustrated as anyone at PSNH, I’m trying to remember that unlike hurricanes where crews from out of state are usually all ready and prepared to go and help the minute the storm pushes through, this storm wasn’t predicted to be a major ice storm. I remember them saying it would change to rain overnight. So it took a couple more days before extra crews were here. That said, the lying as to when repairs would be completed and such is just unacceptable.
I haven’t talked to my mom for a few days, but I talked to my sister and her husband today, and they said that they assume I’ll be staying with them when I come up next week, since I wouldn’t want to stay where there’s no power. So it sounds like the middle of next week might be a little optimistic.
She has plenty of wood, so she’ll be fine, but I don’t think this is how she wanted to start off her retirement.
Glad to see you back on, FL - just in time for today’s and Sunday’s storm to knock us all back off again! Yay!