Can we talk about the week the power went out for 5 days in a row?

I live out in rural Missouri, about 30 miles from Springfield, and last August we had a derecho come through that knocked out power to our whole county. Everyone I talked to was convinced it was the power company's fault, like they were cutting corners or something. But I actually saw the damage firsthand the next morning, trees snapped in half and power lines wrapped around cars like they were string. It wasn't negligence, it was literally a once in a decade storm that hit at 60 miles per hour. What made it stand out was how the whole neighborhood came together, we shared a generator between 3 houses and cooked all the thawing meat on a grill. The conspiracy crowd kept saying it was a planned outage for some grid upgrade, which makes no sense when you see the chaos of a real weather event. Has anyone else lived through a major outage and thought the blame game was way off?

2 comments

2 Comments

troy_scott4d ago

Ain't it wild how quick folks jump to blame the power company before looking at the sky?

joelp814d ago

Totally get what you're saying. I'm out in the sticks of southern Missouri and we had the same thing a few summers back. A straight line wind storm came through and just flattened everything. My neighbor's first instinct was to blame the co-op, but I walked outside the next morning and saw the utility poles snapped like twigs. It was just nature doing its thing, not some grand conspiracy. The solidarity part really hit me too, we had a guy with a chainsaw clearing the road and someone else fired up a big pot of chili on a camp stove for the whole block. It's funny how a bad situation can bring out the best in people, even when others are yelling about some phantom plot that just doesn't hold water when you look at the real damage.