Rodent Regatta

Sometimes photographs simply cannot provide a complete view of devastation.

That’s the case with the photos of Memphis after the storm hit us the morning of July 22, 2003.

Around the corner from me, one of the city’s oldest oak trees toppled in the front yard of a neighbor’s home.

The storm hit around 7:15 in downtown Memphis after crossing the Mississippi River. By 7:35a.m. power was off for 338,000 customers of the local utility company.

The thumbnail to the right points to a fallen tree. It had a flower bed around it.

That flower bed wound up perpendicular to the ground.

Electricity to my home was restored on August 4, 2003 around 6:00p.m.

That’s thirteen days without power.

However, as the photo linked from the thumbnail on the right will show, being without power was the least of the worries for so many.

The house in the photo was struck and almost sliced in half by two trees. The family who lives there is still in a hotel and construction has not yet begun to repair the house. The fellow who owns this house was standing in the den eating a bowl of cereal and looking out his back door. He looked up to see the trees falling. Fortunately, no one was injured.

At my church, we lost 14 trees. This is about the average size of the ones that were lost.

Debris from the clean up is still burned each evening. When the wind and atmospheric conditions are just right we can smell the smoke.

There are still many limbs hanging in the trees. They are likely to fall this winter if we have any snow or ice at all. A light breeze recently brought many of those types of limbs down.

Some of the big names in weblogs are mentioning the 100MPH wind that roared through Memphis on the morning of July, 22, 2003. Most of the remarks follow a weekend New York Times op-ed piece. Tennessee’s master-blogger is 400 miles from where the damage was done.

Those of us on the low-volume end of the blogging spectrum sounded off, but our weak signals weren’t heard. There are still photos to come!

Owning a generator makes lots of sense if you can put a price on comfort, safety and lost productivity during an outage. When the local utility continues saying ”a few days” when they really mean a few weeks, it’s difficult to know how much to invest and when.

For around $2000 plus the fuel that would have been required to operate it, this product would have covered our thirteen-day outage in Memphis for about $160 per day. That’s assuming you bought it and used it only that one time. However, it’s cheap insurance if you operate a home-based business and need to provide steady, reliable power for computers as well as a few other appliances.

Which is worse? 50 million people without power for 12 hours or some portion of 338,000 utility customers who don’t get power fully restored for 15 days? [link provided by Scripting News]

Memphis Light Gas and Water is the local utility in Memphis. According to directors of that utility, 338,000 customers lost power the instant the storm hit.

By day 14 there were still roughly 10,000 customers without power. Memphis was measuring utility customers or electric meters. Using such a metric a family of six would be counted as a single utility customer, though six people were without power. During a work day, a business employing 100 people was counted as a single customer or electric meter.

Memphis got no media coverage. New York and the national media are behaving as if that city dropped into an abyss. All of us are enormously dependent upon electricity. Try to imagine your own life without electricity for 3 or 4 days. What if you couldn’t drive anywhere? How would you keep battery-operated laptops and cellphones and PDA’s running?

How do you sleep when the temperature is 85 degrees and there is 90% humidity?

Welcome back, New York.

Since July 22, 2003 when a major storm devastated Memphis, TN, I’ve had either no cable modem service or very sporadic service.

Weaknesses in the Memphis infrastructure became totally evident when this storm hit. Our local utility lost over 70% of its customer base in about 15 minutes. It took more than 2 weeks to restore electricity. Phone and cable companies are still attempting to recover.

Posting may be intermittent until stable ISP services are restored from the cable company.

As service returns and remains up, I want to post some pictures of the damage. I’ll also offer a couple of thoughts about reading Zeldman’s web standards book by flashlight. Finally, there’s the matter of learning CSS and XHTML well enough to tackle another makeover of this site.

There’s lots to do and lots to look forward to.