Emergency preparedness
Visitors to this blog, alert news-savvy readers that you both are, will already have heard via the media that Buffalo has been smacked by a humongous lake effect snow storm. NPR says that two feet of snow fell overnight, and that there are some 380,000 homes and business without power. Local estimates for the restoration of power have us sitting in our cold dark houses for about a week.
The authorities do not expect campers to be happy with this timetable, for on the news last night, says empowered colleague Colleen, they showed a press conference featuring NY Governor George Pataki (R) and Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown (D), both speaking effusively about "excellent interagency cooperation" during this emergency. Now, Colleen ran a refugee shelter for the Red Cross during Hurricane Katrina, and she knows what these words mean. When the officials say, as they did at the press conference, "Everyone knows their job!", this is because they cannot confidently assert that anyone is actually doing the job he knows is his.
People whose lives have been seriously disrupted will find it hard to be forgiving, but I am not in that class. By the end of the week, perhaps, my broken fence, flooding basement, dry swimsuit and stinking refrigerator will have been promoted in my imagination to "hardships," but reality checks are all around me. Hell, if I had stir-crazy young children, I'd consider myself a martyr.
What made this Friday the 13th storm so bad was that, again as Colleen observed, the leaves were still on the trees. So the heavy wet snow stuck to them, and the wind took down enormous 100-year-old trees very quickly. Power restoration will require not only removing all the boughs which are currently weighing down power lines, but also those which are essentially detached from the trunk but whose menace is hard to see. We could ask our governments to develop better plans for October snow storms, and why not, September and August snow storms, but it may be that this particular nexus of circumstances is unlikely to repeat itself.
Reham and her friend Aimee and I walked up to Tops University Plaza, which was running on generator power. The coolers did not seem to be on, and the store was barely lit. The manager was standing at the door in his leather Buffalo Sabres jacket, telling customers to remove their backpacks. The cash registers were staffed by people from every department. The line stretched back to the back of the store. Our cashier was a middle-aged Russian immigrant who probably lives in the nearby Princeton apartments. She didn't know the produce codes, so Reham gave them to her. (Not that many of our purchases came from produce, I confess.) I stayed on to bag for her for a couple of hours.
What was clear in the store and out in the streets was that folks around here have grown accustomed to being thrust into emergency situations. Buffalo people know not to wait by the phone for interagency cooperation to bring them a solution. There is an unbelievable reflex reaction to sudden hardship, and by the end of the day, neighbors had cleared trees from the streets themselves, plowed out each other's driveways, cleaned debris, set up make-shift neighborhood micro-shelters, and just generally done all the things we like to think a community does, but which our highly prized autonomy normally obscures.
So yeah. I need to grind coffee beans, and I really need to do laundry, and a refrigerator would be nice. I could imagine being wretched in another few days. But for now, and speaking again just for my tiny corner, the inconvenience is outweighed by the privilege of being reminded of the good things neighbors are capable of.
The authorities do not expect campers to be happy with this timetable, for on the news last night, says empowered colleague Colleen, they showed a press conference featuring NY Governor George Pataki (R) and Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown (D), both speaking effusively about "excellent interagency cooperation" during this emergency. Now, Colleen ran a refugee shelter for the Red Cross during Hurricane Katrina, and she knows what these words mean. When the officials say, as they did at the press conference, "Everyone knows their job!", this is because they cannot confidently assert that anyone is actually doing the job he knows is his.
People whose lives have been seriously disrupted will find it hard to be forgiving, but I am not in that class. By the end of the week, perhaps, my broken fence, flooding basement, dry swimsuit and stinking refrigerator will have been promoted in my imagination to "hardships," but reality checks are all around me. Hell, if I had stir-crazy young children, I'd consider myself a martyr.
What made this Friday the 13th storm so bad was that, again as Colleen observed, the leaves were still on the trees. So the heavy wet snow stuck to them, and the wind took down enormous 100-year-old trees very quickly. Power restoration will require not only removing all the boughs which are currently weighing down power lines, but also those which are essentially detached from the trunk but whose menace is hard to see. We could ask our governments to develop better plans for October snow storms, and why not, September and August snow storms, but it may be that this particular nexus of circumstances is unlikely to repeat itself.
Reham and her friend Aimee and I walked up to Tops University Plaza, which was running on generator power. The coolers did not seem to be on, and the store was barely lit. The manager was standing at the door in his leather Buffalo Sabres jacket, telling customers to remove their backpacks. The cash registers were staffed by people from every department. The line stretched back to the back of the store. Our cashier was a middle-aged Russian immigrant who probably lives in the nearby Princeton apartments. She didn't know the produce codes, so Reham gave them to her. (Not that many of our purchases came from produce, I confess.) I stayed on to bag for her for a couple of hours.
What was clear in the store and out in the streets was that folks around here have grown accustomed to being thrust into emergency situations. Buffalo people know not to wait by the phone for interagency cooperation to bring them a solution. There is an unbelievable reflex reaction to sudden hardship, and by the end of the day, neighbors had cleared trees from the streets themselves, plowed out each other's driveways, cleaned debris, set up make-shift neighborhood micro-shelters, and just generally done all the things we like to think a community does, but which our highly prized autonomy normally obscures.
So yeah. I need to grind coffee beans, and I really need to do laundry, and a refrigerator would be nice. I could imagine being wretched in another few days. But for now, and speaking again just for my tiny corner, the inconvenience is outweighed by the privilege of being reminded of the good things neighbors are capable of.
posted by amerune at 9:56 AM
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