Quote:
Originally posted by dave
Uh.... you know, if you don't open the refrigerator, it stays pretty cold in there. So you don't need to throw out all the food.
"Power Company To Blame For People Being Stupid"
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That technique works pretty well if you experience an outage of a few hours, or even overnight, but my parents (in Detroit) were told to expect three days of no electricity. At that point you face a conundrum -- open the fridge to use what food you can, before it spoils (as some of it surely will), or keep the thing shut and eat canned goods for 3 days**.
BTW, just as an answer to a question posed on
this thread, my parents and their elderly neighbors also had to deal with a bunch of stuff we don't normally think of:
-grocery stores running out of food as people rush to buy (with no functional sales registers) and stock is not replenished because it will perish without electricity.
-can't get gas at a nearby station in order to drive somewhere with food, as the pumps require electricity;
-no public transportation, due either to no gas or no electricity;
-electric garage door openers;
-no traffic lights if you do manage to venture out by car;
-in some cases, no running water, because it is electrically pumped;
-in cases of gravity or other non-electric water supply, being advised not to drink without boiling, because treatment is compromised without electricity (difficult if your stove is electric);
-for many people, no phone, if they have given up all their basic land-lines (cordless sets and those that feed through an answering machine are unuseable in an outage, as well as, in this case, many cell phones);
-no AC for 3 days, which is usually tolerable at home because you can always go someplace else to cool off, only this time no one else has AC either;
-**special problems of the elderly, such as not being able to open canned goods, as you gave up the manual can opener in favor of electric bacause of your arthritis.
So, yeah, maybe the power company shouldn't have to reimburse 1.2 million people for the ruined ice cream, but for a whole lot of people, this wasn't a typical short-term blackout.