1 post tagged “paranoia”

At about midnight, the backyard lit up like daylight.  Then pop!  Transformer blown, power out.  The cats and I went back to sleep, but I woke up at about 4:00 am to the sound of rain.  Not freezing rain, not sleet, not snow.  Just rain.  You know, the stuff that makes my basement flood unless the sump pumps are working, which of course they aren't when the power is out.  So, there I was in the basement with a flashlight, checking to see if I had water coming in.  Nothing, but I went ahead and moved some stuff in case it did. 

At 7:30, the power came back on and I immediately tromped outside to push the reset buttons on all the sump pumps.  No flooding still.  Even without electricity for almost 8 hours to run the fan on the furnace, the house wasn't too cold, but it gave me a paranoid feeling.  Do you ever think about how the newer appliances leave us helpless?  When I lived in an old Victorian with a hundred-year old boiler/radiator system, I never had to worry about having electricity to run my furnace fan.  If the power went out, I could manually ignite the boiler and heat the house.  Same with my old gas stove that had to be lit with matches.  Some newer gas stoves have "safety features" which render them useless in a power outage. 

Here was my paranoid feeling: imagine if your electricity went out tomorrow and stayed out.  How long would it take before you were completely helpless without government intervention?  How long before you did whatever the government told you to do?  Remember New Orleans?  How people were forced to evacuate and then prevented from returning?  What would it take for you to be driven from your home?