Guy's Dropper
Enlightened
I'd rather have tornadoes, hurricanes and ice storms than wildfires and earthquakes. Everyone in CA better be ready for the next San Andreas movement. It's going to be a real doozey.
The New England ice storm of 2008
- Thread starter MacTech
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curlyfry562
Enlightened
At least those happen at greater intervals
MacTech, one thing I am glad you brought up is the necessity for lights with extended runtime. Most of us, myself included, tend to focus on how bright, not how long a light lasts. After reading your post I did a quick inventory of my vampires, and realized that I don't have that many
I just gave my self an excuse to buy more lights. I think I am going to run gown to target and get some more Inova X5's
lctorana
Flashlight Enthusiast
Yup, there is no excuse for not owning an Eveready 9101IND or similar.
A mile of throw, 100+ hours' runtime, and 10-year battery shelf life.
At about $20 + battery, it's very cheap insurance.
A mile of throw, 100+ hours' runtime, and 10-year battery shelf life.
At about $20 + battery, it's very cheap insurance.
WadeF
Flashlight Enthusiast
An ice storm is a prolonged period of freezing rain, often with significant aggregation (sticking to surfaces). The precipitation falls as rain which is actually below freezing (super-cooled). This "rain" than contacts a surface and sticks on it. Over time the ice begins to weigh down branches and powerlines... Freezing rain is formed when the precipitation falls through a shallow layer of warm air within a few thousand feet of the surface. The air right at the surface is below freezing, however, it is not thick enough to refreeze the raindrops which instead super-cool. If the cool layer is just a little thicker you get the much less dangerous yet infinitely hard to shovel sleet
Have to love being a Meteorology Major
Is the rain really below freezing? I don't see how rain drops can be below freezing without being ice. I understood freezing rain to just be rain (the rain drops are probably near freezing) that lands on frozen surfaces. Power lines, trees, sidewalks, etc, that are below freezing which causes the near freezing rain drops to freeze on contact. Temperatures near the surface that remain below freezing will keep all surfaces below freezing.
It's like spraying water dropplets into your freezer.
So the dangers of freezing rain over prolonged periods of time is you can get thick accumulations of ice, sometimes several inces, that will bring down tree branches, power lines, etc. I'll take snow over freezing rain any day.
Tekno_Cowboy
Flashlight Enthusiast
Count yourself lucky it's not the -14 F that it is here at the moment.
AA6TZ
Enlightened
AA6TZ
Enlightened
MacTech -- I'm really sorry to hear of your- and everyone else in the affected states'- misfortune. DAMN that's some insanely cold weather!!!
I've been listening on the Ham bands and consistantly hear operators talking about how this is arguably *THE* coldest winter they can remember in many, many years.
In the meantime . . .
Stay well -- and I, for one, will be looking forward to reading your posts regarding the status of your weather & power situation.
Best Regards,
-Clive
Illum
Flashaholic
they aren't snow-proof either...if your going for solar...build yourself a portable system that you can tote along should you have to evacuate for any meteorological/geographic reasons as the solar arrays usually winds up costing more than the house as an asset on paper. Plus typically your going to have to run it for ~10 years before you can earn back the cost...as long as the consumer grade panels still perform at ~28% efficiency:candle:
I was thinking of something like this for portable, we have a couple as demonstration units on campus [see pic1, pic2], personally I have not found a better prebuilt system
http://www.solarone.net/products/harvester.cfm
invest in a couple extra solar panels [up to 3]
- Expandable solar array 80 watts to 240 watts
- Choice of 600W inverters Truesine 110V/60Hz or 220V/50Hz
- Advanced 15 amp PWM charge controller with LCD display
- 105AH battery pack
- More than one DC outlet plus two shielded RV style outlets.
- Environment: 0-100F, 100% humidity. Rain snow resistant
- Power box: ABS/Polyethlyene 20x20x10", 70LB with battery
- Removable dolly with solid "leak-proof" urathane wheels
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MacTech
Enlightened
12/16/08.....
NO POWER
NO CMP TRUCKS
Beech Ridge, Birch Hill, and Goodwin, streets that border our road HAVE POWER, WE ARE STILL OUT!!!, CMP is still CLAIMING that there are crews in the area (BS!), yet we have yet to see a single truck!
I talked with a "supervisor" at CMP and she basically admitted that they don't deal with the "fiddly onsie-twosie situations until the end of the outage", basically admitting that our road, which has about 30 houses on it, is being ignored!
I took a drive around this morning, evaluating the poles, and found a popped breaker bar on one of the poles, IOW, I did CMP's evaluation job for them, and it only took me about three minutes to find the tripped breaker, obviously I called it in, fat lot of good it will do though, I also distributed CMP's corporate number to a few more of my neighbors, all were quite happy to get the number, as every one of them said, without me even asking "we haven't seen any trucks"
...once this outage is over, we are going to have a LONG conversation with CMP about their incompetence and their deliberate ignoring of an entire group of customers, I want heads to roll for this!
Lights used last night;
Hurricane oil lamp, Candleier candle lantern (very efficient device, only burned 1/4 of the length of the candles) for area lighting, PT EOS and SureFire A2 Aviator on LED for general use
Discovered that the hurricane lamp's wick can be turned down to a dim blue glow and run all night, raising the wick will increase light, this lamp has both a "Find Me" glow, infinitely variable brightness and a good long runtime...
NO POWER
NO CMP TRUCKS
Beech Ridge, Birch Hill, and Goodwin, streets that border our road HAVE POWER, WE ARE STILL OUT!!!, CMP is still CLAIMING that there are crews in the area (BS!), yet we have yet to see a single truck!
I talked with a "supervisor" at CMP and she basically admitted that they don't deal with the "fiddly onsie-twosie situations until the end of the outage", basically admitting that our road, which has about 30 houses on it, is being ignored!
I took a drive around this morning, evaluating the poles, and found a popped breaker bar on one of the poles, IOW, I did CMP's evaluation job for them, and it only took me about three minutes to find the tripped breaker, obviously I called it in, fat lot of good it will do though, I also distributed CMP's corporate number to a few more of my neighbors, all were quite happy to get the number, as every one of them said, without me even asking "we haven't seen any trucks"
...once this outage is over, we are going to have a LONG conversation with CMP about their incompetence and their deliberate ignoring of an entire group of customers, I want heads to roll for this!
Lights used last night;
Hurricane oil lamp, Candleier candle lantern (very efficient device, only burned 1/4 of the length of the candles) for area lighting, PT EOS and SureFire A2 Aviator on LED for general use
Discovered that the hurricane lamp's wick can be turned down to a dim blue glow and run all night, raising the wick will increase light, this lamp has both a "Find Me" glow, infinitely variable brightness and a good long runtime...
Tiff
Newly Enlightened
- Joined
- Dec 15, 2008
- Messages
- 76
Yes, it really can be and storms like this are deceptive because when you see over a meter of snow on the ground from 1 storm you KNOW it's a problem. But with Freezing rain and ice storms in general you don't see much just drizzle or rain. The last big ice storm we had snapped off the tops of all the trees for hundreds of miles around! You can even see that many haven't grown back even now. Plus we are sure to get a Nor'Easter or two at least this season and winter has just started! We still have all of January and February left to go. :sigh:
brighterisbetter
Flashlight Enthusiast
We haven't lost power yet in Kansas City, but definitely lots of snow. So much in fact that I'm driveway-ridden and not able to make it to work. Lucky for me my remote desktop client allows me to perform most of my duties from the home PC. This really sucks. :thumbsdow
Socrates67
Newly Enlightened
- Joined
- Dec 1, 2007
- Messages
- 10
Well I was in the middle of this storm in southern NH, and I am still in the middle of it. I got some details of what has been happening in the stores that this forum may find quite interesting. Thursday night the power went out, heard trees snapping all through the night, sounded like a T-Rex smashing through the forest in mating season. In the morning it looked bad to me, until I drove down to the town of Derry. Took two hours to go 26 miles. Let me give you the basics; Derry is the largest "township" in NH and the fourth largest community after Manchester, Nashua and Concord (the capitol). It is a typical "bedroom" community with hundreds of cul-de-sacs and way too much recent expansion. It use to be all farmland until huge numbers of people came up from Massachusetts, for half a century the farms lay abandoned and then the suburbs came. This all means that they have thousands of half-century old trees grown all over the place, mostly maples and some pines. And they all came crashing down Thursday night.
Now you can understand the situation. Half a million people without power (state population is 1.3 million). Derry was the hardest hit and it looked like an atomic war. Out of 36,000 people in town 95% were without power, and over 200 roads in just this town alone were closed because of downed trees and power lines. I have even seen entire utility poles snapped in half.
Friday morning I went into Wal-mart. Results so far: All the lanterns were gone, both battery kind and gas lanterns. Needless to say all the generators for a 200 mile radius were gone, one guy drove 200 miles to New York to get one. Friday night the D-batteries were all gone, but all the C's and AA's were good. The flashlights of all types seemed untouched on the store shelves.
Monday: In Wal-mart, Target, Loew's Home-Depot and pharmacies and harware stores all the D's were still gone, the C's were now all gone, most 9V were gone, but amazingly the supply of AA and AAA was enormous, thousands of those are still on the shelves (including 123's and the other odd sizes). Most of the flashlights were now gone, except the ones that took AA or AAA (like some nice new Colman types, the ones that output 115 lumens). The Mag-lites seemed untouched for the most part, both the big D's and the Mini-mags. Dumb, I think Mags are the best choice for emergencies but I am biased.
When this all started I myself had: A cheap old unnamed combo flashlight and flourescent lamp that took C's, too weak under any conditions, a new but cheap no-name chinese made 9-LED little thing that took three AAA's, that thing would not work at all. The only thing that worked was my three Mags, a 3C and two Mini-mags. Naturally I used them all in "candle" mode (can't stick the big Mag in it's own hood as a base like the mini's, instead I stuck it upright in a mug. Eventually though I crunched a mini's ican lamp when I tried to screw the hood back on (the one weak point of all the old Mini-Mags, the ican lamps that are fragile and burnout all the time). Went looking through the stores for a Nite-Ize 1Watt conversion kit but couldn't find one (only those weaker 3 LED ones). Bought a new LED Mini-Mag instead. WOW! What a difference! As bright as my 3C ican Mag, smooth beam too. I am a convert to this new LED Mini-Mag for life now.
And so now here I am in Day 5 of this crisis, fortunately I moved out fo Derry three months ago to a place that already had a heavy duty generator installed (this new town has short power outages three times a week even on sunny days). I missed a serious personal disaster by a mere three months, the old place had no generator, like a person I knew who skipped a vacation in the Maldives on the day the great tsunami struck.
Counting my blessings (and marvelling at my new Mag).
Now you can understand the situation. Half a million people without power (state population is 1.3 million). Derry was the hardest hit and it looked like an atomic war. Out of 36,000 people in town 95% were without power, and over 200 roads in just this town alone were closed because of downed trees and power lines. I have even seen entire utility poles snapped in half.
Friday morning I went into Wal-mart. Results so far: All the lanterns were gone, both battery kind and gas lanterns. Needless to say all the generators for a 200 mile radius were gone, one guy drove 200 miles to New York to get one. Friday night the D-batteries were all gone, but all the C's and AA's were good. The flashlights of all types seemed untouched on the store shelves.
Monday: In Wal-mart, Target, Loew's Home-Depot and pharmacies and harware stores all the D's were still gone, the C's were now all gone, most 9V were gone, but amazingly the supply of AA and AAA was enormous, thousands of those are still on the shelves (including 123's and the other odd sizes). Most of the flashlights were now gone, except the ones that took AA or AAA (like some nice new Colman types, the ones that output 115 lumens). The Mag-lites seemed untouched for the most part, both the big D's and the Mini-mags. Dumb, I think Mags are the best choice for emergencies but I am biased.
When this all started I myself had: A cheap old unnamed combo flashlight and flourescent lamp that took C's, too weak under any conditions, a new but cheap no-name chinese made 9-LED little thing that took three AAA's, that thing would not work at all. The only thing that worked was my three Mags, a 3C and two Mini-mags. Naturally I used them all in "candle" mode (can't stick the big Mag in it's own hood as a base like the mini's, instead I stuck it upright in a mug. Eventually though I crunched a mini's ican lamp when I tried to screw the hood back on (the one weak point of all the old Mini-Mags, the ican lamps that are fragile and burnout all the time). Went looking through the stores for a Nite-Ize 1Watt conversion kit but couldn't find one (only those weaker 3 LED ones). Bought a new LED Mini-Mag instead. WOW! What a difference! As bright as my 3C ican Mag, smooth beam too. I am a convert to this new LED Mini-Mag for life now.
And so now here I am in Day 5 of this crisis, fortunately I moved out fo Derry three months ago to a place that already had a heavy duty generator installed (this new town has short power outages three times a week even on sunny days). I missed a serious personal disaster by a mere three months, the old place had no generator, like a person I knew who skipped a vacation in the Maldives on the day the great tsunami struck.
Counting my blessings (and marvelling at my new Mag).
JNewell
Flashlight Enthusiast
I can tell you from experience that that's true. Back in '85 were were living in Portland and there was a hurricane-related blackout. Our neighborhood was back on line within a day or two but we were out for a week because there was just out house and the building next door that were out after everyone else came back on.
Generators: I am an owner and a user, but there are tons of issues to be aware of. Do you have oil and gas? Do you have spare parts and the ability to service the d*mn thing (most are not made for continuous duty)? Have you got a safe plan to store gas in quantity???
MacTech
Enlightened
Here's a graphic of the situation and why we're frustrated;
jrmcferren
Enlightened
I can think of a few legitimate reasons where your power would still be off and the neighboring roads would be online. If those lines feed to a fire station, police station, Hospital, ect; they would be online to serve the. Also there are people that have priority to be reconnected, these people need electricty for medical devices. It is also a possiblity that your situation is being overlooked due to the large scale of the disaster, and calling in will not help too much. I understand that you are upset I would be upset as well in your situation as it seems that it may be a simple reset that needs done.
Youfoundnemo
Enlightened
Jrmc has a good point, you should call and say that the old woman down your block hasnt been able to take her nebulizer treatments all week and that you are worried for her safety, they will certianly be quicker to get power on because they dont want any blood on their hands. This may be a dirty trick to play but it is effective
jrmcferren
Enlightened
I don't think that will work, I believe that such users have to register with the utility beforehand, but I don't know for sure.
Edit as per later post: I HOWEVER, WOULD NEVER CONDONE SUCH A PRACTICE!!!!!
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StarHalo
Flashaholic
Just make a list of all the neighborhoods in your area, then arrange it by average income, starting with highest first and declining thereafter - that's the order in which any utility will be restored after an emergency event.
MacTech
Enlightened
None of these roads feed any emergency facilities, yes it's possible the family at the intersection had medical issues, but it's still inexcusable that they didn't even check our road, they could see the houses were dark....
and this morning, when driving around the block, I saw a CMP truck driving down Birch Hill, AWAY from us, towards South Berwick, I had the urge to chase it down and handbrake turn in front of it, blocking it in, and telling them to turn around and FIX Frost Hill!
needless to say, if I see any CMP trucks on the drive home tonight, I will be asking them, very nicely, whether they have plans to get the power on on Frost Hill, it's obvious the "Suits" can't be trusted
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