Random thoughts following Arthur's 7-day power outage

The tropical storm that caused 1-2 week power outages (depending on location) throughout New Brunswick and Nova Scotia (well over 200,000 affected customers in total) felt a little like a preview of a catastrophic event. Josh is writing a full-length blog post about his thoughts and feelings during and following the storm. This is my post, and it's short and sweet, and just includes a few of the main thoughts that came to my mind...

Saint John, NB, the morning after the storm

1) Out of the 7-9 days of outage in Fredericton, NB, at least 6 were perfectly sunny. So, if more people had solar power capacity, they wouldn't be up s**t creek. Our neighbours, who are off-grid, said "we wouldn't even know anything was different"; apparently, were also offering hot showers and such to friends and neighbours in need.

2) When power was out, rural homes, which depend on wells (and hence pumps) were out of water. Which means that you need to truck bottled water for drinking, face washing, tooth brushing, and the occasional toilet flushing. Josh's parents had a pond in their back yard, so bucketing for toilet purposes was relatively easy. However, if people had to bucket water to flush their toilets every day, how long would the flush toilets system last? Why are we supporting such a fragile (and wasteful) system?

3) From conversations we overheard: "people were actually socializing, neighbours were meeting for supper and helping each other. But only until power came on..." Seriously? That's what it takes to revert back to a normal, social life? All of our conveniences need to be gone, apparently...

4) Why do people have so much frozen meat???

5) Line-ups for gas and propane - the only reason things went mostly "as normal". Grocery stores were running on generators, and still some had spoiled produce and meat. People ran their home fridges on generators and cooked on propane stoves. What would happen if these fossil fuels would be either unavailable or super expensive?

It was pretty neat and a little scary to see the changes that occur in our society under what can be considered a fairly small-scale disaster. Small scale, because we could still get around and had cheap gas to run our lives mostly as normal. But it did provide a little glimpse into the future, and when you add into the equation climate change and future oil shortages, I sure didn't like what I saw...