Mid-90 Temps... blech

If I ever go to Disney again, I'm having you plan out my itinerary. I know I'd hit all the important features with your advice backing me up.

I do that for a lot of people... my family wants me to take the classes to become a travel agent and then just focus on disney travel...

But you'd like it best if they open a Northern Lights franchise of Disney, wouldn't you? Somewhere south of Barrow and west of British Columbia should be about right.

Olympia said:

But you'd like it best if they open a Northern Lights franchise of Disney, wouldn't you? Somewhere south of Barrow and west of British Columbia should be about right.

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nah.... I don't see myself going on splash mt in November up here lol

Olympia said:

I really feel for the people in the DC area who have been without electrical power during this awful week. I heard that one city used city buses as cooling centers, which is a smart solution.

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Olympia, I think you might have been forced to make an exception to your very sensible rule if you had been here in DC and had power. I lost mine for the second time in 6 weeks, this time for 3 whole days practically to the minute. The previous outage was for two days, but thankfully the weather was far cooler nearly 2 months ago. I lost all of my perishable food both times. This recent heat wave was positively deadly. It was literally like stepping inside your oven when you went outside and the worst heat was usually around 5 pm. I never drank so much water in my life. Unlike a lot of other places, the DC region has a large senior population relative to the rest, my mother being one of them. A number of those senior care facilities lost power or struggled to keep up with generators. I read a news report today about a woman who is still without power but has a generator. Unfortunately, she can't use it to power her A/C or her lights because she needs to power her medical equipment. Electrical workers are stretched to the breaking point. The subway system has had numerous heat related delays, accidents and repairs as the tracks have literally buckled from the heat (heat they were not designed for )
Houses have been crushed by trees and roads have buckled in places. Sadly, a young woman on her motorcycle was even paralyzed by a falling tree during the initial storm.

Then there's the question of what the able bodied were meant to do to stay cool. Despite being powerless for 3 days myself, I have met nearly a dozen people in the last week who were out of power for a full week or more. I counted at least four days in a 9 day span were we reached 100 or higher. I work in a large chain book store at the moment and there were swarms of people coming into our store due to its size, A/C and free WIFI. Every available outlet was being used by "customers". It was more like an emergency shelter than a store for about 5 days. Sadly, over the weekend three young boys drowned in a local body of water while apparently trying to cool off late at night just two days before the heat finally broke today. They were three of a few dozen fatalities just in my area. Nationally more than 60 had died as of yesterday.

I've heard people locally and on the news question how this could happen. What a lot of people don't realize is that DC and the surrounding area have a lot of really old established neighborhoods with more above ground power lines encased by huge old trees that you would expect for such a wealthy city. That point combined with the fact that many of the more affluent neighborhoods put of strong resistance for decades to significant tree trimming and burying lines due to either aesthetic or environmental concerns has led to a massive and extremely expensive backlog of work to modernize the power grid. The local utility estimated a cost of $ 5-8 million per mile to bury all the neighborhood lines in the area. So instead they do nothing but patch up problems and occasionally trim trees. That foot dragging is compounded by the fact that the regional utility covers parts of MD, VA and all of DC which includes numerous state, citywide and countywide governments who all have different budgets, laws, populations and geography.

I hope this wakes up some members of Congress and local governments, since they actually suffered through this disaster, to invest more in covering the cost to upgrading our infrastructure including our electric grid. By contrast, Germans suffer an average of 21 minutes of power outages per year.

That sounds awful, jcoates. I send you my sympathy. I live farther north, and it was bad enough here; it must have been unimaginably torturous without any power whatsoever. When I was outside, I felt as you did that I was walking around in an oven. The thought of that woman having to choose between powering her air and powering her medical equipment... heartbreaking.

I too am angry about infrastructure all over the country, which we probably shouldn't go into in detail here because it might be seen as political. All I will say is that it shouldn't be political. As for the District of Columbia, you plainly have the worst of all worlds: scattered jurisdictions, unclassifiable structure (not part of a state, not a borough or county, not a city), and areas of great wealth cheek-by-jowl with areas of extreme poverty. John Kennedy once said that Washington itself was a city of southern efficiency and northern charm.

It's great that your bookstore was able to help in that way. I'm sure you made a huge difference for people who were enduring otherwise unrelieved misery.