I was in North Van last week, headed home to Vernon around 13:00 Saturday in the midst of the carnage. Talk about a mess, don't recall how many U-turns I had to make to try & get out of the megalopolis! Spent a good hour in a traffic jam on Hwy 1 in Burnaby due to downed trees. On my motorbike, running low on fuel I couldn't find a gas station with power until I reached Abbottsford. The COOP on Mt. Lehman road had their Diesel & Premium pumps working, no regular. In retrospect, perhaps I should have headed north to Squamish & rode to Vernon via the northern route, Lillooet/Cache Creek/Kamloops, same as my trip to the city a week before.
Sucks to lose tank critters, but it's a good wake up call for all of us. There's more at stake than pets when nature gets nasty. A little girl in Washington became the victim of a falling tree branch. We can consider ourselves fortunate if all we lose are replaceable material objects. Governments & corporations that provide "essentials" such as electricity really need to get a bit more proactive in running lines underground where they'll be less prone to damage from wind storms. Our hydro infrastructure is highly centralized, which means the right kind of "perfect storm" can put a large chunk of the population in the dark as shown by the events last week. It's not like this is a lesson that hasn't been learned before, again & again, but we get complacent.
Never a bad idea to prepare oneself for disaster. Relying on the gov't/corporation is not good insurance when things go south. I'm delinquent myself in that regard, since power outages here in Vernon are very short & rare. I've been meaning to get some solar panels up & a bank of deep discharge batteries, but keep putting it off, mainly due to finances. Purchased a small wind generator years ago, but it's still sitting in the basement.
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