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Blog
A new appreciation for our electrical grid
August 27, 2007
There's an old saying that we don't appreciate what we have until it's gone. I took Thursday and Friday off last week for some family business, and it's a good thing I did. If you follow national news at all, the Chicago area got clobbered Thursday afternoon by some violent storms (that some say were actually low grade tornadoes) and a whole lot of rain in a very short time. I hope you weren't trying to fly through O'Hare during that mess.
Anyway, a tree fell down on our neighborhood power lines that feed around 30 houses. This happened at about 3:30 or so on Thursday afternoon. We weren't alone. News reports were that more than 300,000 ComEd customers were out at the worst point. Sunday morning at about 10:00 the lights went back on after about 65 hours of darkness. It's sort of like camping in your own house.
The experience made me go back to an article in our August issue about SCADA systems for power distribution. It also made me appreciate having electricity and made me sympathetic for those that are still out.
Posted by Peter Welander on August 27, 2007 | Comments (0)