The power in our house went out at 11:20 p.m. and it was restored at about 4:30 a.m., making it a five-hour, not seven-hour outage,
I checked around the community as best I could and there were no major troubling incidents I could. find. The planned outage, from I could ascertain, essentially was an inconvenience.
I thought I could get through the “crisis” by simply using my laptop with a powerful battery. I could, but I could not connect with the Internet, so my plans for late night work were foiled.
When I awakened early Sunday morning, I began to determine that the Consumers Energy planned outage was a lot like the Y2K scare from the year 2000 — a lot of wasted time and energy worrying about a catastrophe that did did not materialize,
A number of citizens in the community went to great lengths to protest the whole development, insisting there would be consequences such as frozen water pipes, necessary devices shut down at the expense of the infirmed and the needy. A far as I can tell, the planned outage was an inconvenience, but not a disaster.
One Townbroadcast follower, Tom Andrews, called out my overlooking the plight of the folks at the Windor Woods mobile home village. I hereby share his commentary:
“The majority of people upset and complaining about the outage were residents of Windsor Woods mobile home village. There are 330 homes in this park, and ALL depend on heat tape to keep their water pipes from freezing.
“At the time the postcards were received, the National Weather Service (GR) forecast Saturday overnight temperatures to be in the 20’s. Without leaving water running, residents were in doubt if their pipes could withstand six hours of sub-freezing air.
“Cold sleeping, refrigerators warming, medical devices, keeping babies protected were minor issues faced by all of the 3,000 homes affected. But the folks up on “The Ridge,” in their $400K homes didn’t face the frozen pipes problem, and if they did have a pipe burst, they could probably afford the repairs. Not so the residents of Windsor Woods; frozen pipes may have been a significant financial blow for them and a major inconvenience.
“Fortunately, as the week passed, the NWS kept raising their projected low temperatures for Saturday. A warmup appeared and the actual temperature ROSE after dark to the mid or upper 40’s overnight Saturday.
“The other issues remained, but at least the pipes were safe!”
