Kentucky's got no electricity!

[Beldaran]

...I was thinking sit by a window.

At night?

[The_Amaster]

Well, no, obviously not at night, but during the day...oh forget it.

[Dechipher]

Well, no, obviously not at night, but during the day...oh forget it.

I'm gonna make a thread about you now.

[Archibaldo]

What a bunch of pussies. We had an ice storm in Montreal back in '98 or '99 and lots of people went with out power for a month. And it's a hell of a lot colder in Montreal than in Kentucky.

[Trevelyan_06]

What a bunch of pussies. We had an ice storm in Montreal back in '98 or '99 and lots of people went with out power for a month. And it's a hell of a lot colder in Montreal than in Kentucky.

Wait, Canada has electricity?

[Masamune]

I think it was only a recent development in Canadian history.

[Archibaldo]

Well we used to have sled dogs running on a treadmil to generate power. But with the rise in cost of dog food, we had to switch to hydro.

[MottZilla]

I never understand why companies do this. I would rather them get equipment that can handle extreme conditions, and if that means raising the prices, I'd gladly pay it to prevent things like this from happening.

I don't believe they've invented Ice-Proof electrical lines and utility poles yet. But I'm sure they'd be happy to take your money.

Power outages happen. You just have to deal with it. In the winter, it would help to have a fire place or wood burning stove to heat your home with wood. In the summer, hopefully you have your water service for cool water, and perhaps some backup battery power for a fan. People dieing because of these storms are due to other things than the lack of electricity.

[Beldaran]

If you live in a place where it gets extremely cold, and you are unprepared for power outages, you are being foolish.

I grew up in the far corner of Washington State where it would get pretty damn cold some years, and occasionally we'd have a windstorm that caused the power to go out. My family had bottled water, kerosene powered heaters, candles, crank driven flashlights, food that didn't need to be cooked, etc. People just need to prepare more.

[AtmaWeapon]

I am really tired of every ignorant mouthbreather on the planet whining, "Well why didn't they design it for this?" every time some natural disaster destroys our penis -- I mean -- technology and a few elderly (who get a free pass) and young people (who are stupid for not being prepared) die.

First, you need to realize that failsafes aren't perfect. There probably were failsafes in place. Critical infrastructure like electrical plants usually have several layers of failsafes; if you have 6 layers of failsafe with a 5% chance of failure, that makes the chance of all 6 failing something like 0.0000015625%. But you know what? "Astronomical odds against" doesn't mean "impossible". Sometimes it's your unlucky day and all of the failsafes fail. You hear about this because it's newsworthy, but it's hardly the same debacle when "4 out of the 5 failsafes at the electrical plant failed today, but the fifth took over and prevented an explosion." No one reports on it and no one cares about it unless the 5th failsafe is a bus of orphans that died. It's not like Kentucky's electrical grid had zero redundancy and was teetering on the edge of failure; instead it got hit by a powerful ice storm that overwhelmed its defenses and rendered it useless.

Also, the cost of hardening equipment tends to be exponential; the tougher it is, the more that next level of toughness costs. It's really similar to role playing games: getting to level 2 takes 100 xp and you can do it in a day, but getting to level 20 from level 19 takes 1,000,000 xp and it takes longer to do it, even fighting higher level monsters. In the real world, it's the difference between "steel shell" and "polymer shell resistant to low temperatures" for a transformer. The next step up might be "headed liquid pump system increases temperature resistance", but now you're depending on a liquid pump system that has its own mean time to failure and requires its own failsafes and regular maintenance by workers with expensive licenses. Going a step above that might mean "inside a fortified bunker with geothermal heat power", which brings the need for security, maintenance, and the availability of geothermal power. See how each step can add much more costs than the last? Now, how do you make "power line that doesn't snap when several hundred extra pounds of load is applied due to ice?" What about "utility pole that can bear several hundred pounds of atypical load when exposed to extreme temperatures"? Maybe an alternative is to bury all of the wires, but this requires redoing an entire state's power grid; it's a multi-year multi-billion dollar project that increases the cost of inspection and maintenance. It's also going to add more fatalities because of yokels that don't check the location of buried lines before they dig holes. Would you really pay $500 extra or more per month for your utility company to use diamond-sheathed wire, special alloy telephone poles, and bomb-safe bunkers for substations so that once-in-a-lifetime blizzards (Remember, it's global warming kids! We won't have blizzards soon!) don't knock out the power? What about a 1% addition to sales tax in order to subsidize burying the cables? No, under normal circumstances as soon as "increase your bill" or "increased taxes" are mentioned you'd pull out every whine in the book about how it's your rectum that's being violated.

Finally, there's the little fact that nature is extremely powerful. I don't think it was winds and water that destroyed the levees in New Orleans. I think it was the 100 ton chunks of interstate that the wind and water were pushing against the levees. What are we supposed to do in the face of a force that can throw mountains at us? How do you design a machine capable of operating normally in conditions that can vary from "evaporates water in seconds" to "freezes water in seconds"? I'd normally accept "It's not my job to answer that question." but in this case the answer is that it's impossible to do so.

I live in Austin, Texas, and it's only been below freezing a few times since I moved here. Still, I have dozens of blankets, several sterno cans, flashlights that run off of cranks and shakes, and a week of food that can be cooked by boiling some water (I'm lacking those "smash me and I produce heat" packs; I need to buy some.) If this fails, I'm going to neighbors and we're pooling resources; if need be we'll figure a way to relocate somewhere that does have what we need. I'm not laying in my bed crying about it; if I freeze to death it's going to be on a death march to warmer places.