Thursday, January 28, 2021

18 Hours without power [Working from Home - Day 319]

An extreme atmospheric river storm that reached Northern California on Tuesday evening brought extreme wind gusts overnight and is continuing to wreak havoc Wednesday morning in the Sacramento Valley and Sierra Nevada.

Fierce, howling southerly winds knocked out power for tens of thousands in the valley, many of whom remain without power. The gusts toppled trees, and the mix of high winds with a half-inch and an inch of rain near the capital contributed to numerous traffic incidents on Sacramento-area highways. Downed power lines and trees also forced extended roadway closures, many of them overnight.
With winds topping 60 mph, we lost power on Tuesday night after 10 pm. It was a long night with the wind hammering the house; neither Sharon or I slept very well.

Using my iPhone as a hot spot for my Mac laptop, I ended up attending about four hours of meetings on Wednesday morning. I was shocked at how well the set up performed, particularly in a two long Microsoft Teams video conferencing meetings. The biggest negative was that the house was starting to get pretty cold. With the batteries wearing down in all of my devices, I cancelled my afternoon meetings. This was probably fortuitous; cell performance started to deteriorate after lunch...

Just as we were starting to make hotel reservations for Wednesday night, the power came back on just after 4 pm. While 18 hours is not that long, we just aren't prepared for an extended outage. Living in the suburbs of a large city, I just never expected this long an outage. Additionally, in our neighborhood, the power is underground.

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