What is up with the northeast? Either that was a beyond massive storm or the economy is really slow to react fast. I get the blackouts for 1-2 days but half a week is bad. I hate to think how dependent we are to electricity (spoiled food and no communication, much less mythruna down). Just a question, do you guys in the NE have to worry about rolling blackouts in hot summer days? Texas is on the verge over-electrical consumption, it was so bad last year.
No, we don't worry about rolling blackouts and this sort of thing rarely happens. It was kind of a freak storm that took us by surprise... 80 MPH sustained winds took a lot of trees down. We are an extremely wooded area. Our neighbor lost a bunch of branches and the top half of one of his tall pine trees demolished a section of our fence (6 foot tall fence).
We lost power during the winter once a few years ago long enough that when we got power again I immediately bought a portable generator. So in our case we were able to keep the fridge running and some other small things. I wasn't sure the local cable would be up so I didn't bother to try to bootstrap my network. On Sunday morning it was clear the heat was going to be a problem (near record heat wave around here... 109 degrees, etc.) so I went out and bought a window AC unit to tide us over. The generator saved us for sure.
...but we all did a happy dance when the power came back on late Sunday afternoon. 43 hours total for us, I think.
I heard that power trucks from other states as far north as Canada and from states far south were up to help fix the damage. On one road I was driving on on Sunday, about half the power poles had been shored up so must have either gone down or close to it.
Just to give a clue, though... when I rebooted my main network Linux machine it told me that the file system hadn't been checked in 354 days... which means that's how long it was since the last reboot. So some time near a year ago, power must have been out for more than 40 minutes... but not since then.