Dr. Phil's Dreamwidth Journal

I Was Going To Write A Different Post

But just before I started, the power came back on.

Winter Storm Draco deposited almost no snow here in Allendale, but we had gusty high winds up to 50 mph all night and most of the day. So not a total surprise when the lights went out at 11:15 this morning. ... wait six seconds and the Kohler 12kW automatic backup generator came on.

The laptop had a battery, so it didn't go out, of course. For once I decided to see what Consumers Energy did online for outages. The header said that 25,000, no make that 27,000 customers were affected. They had a nice map, which had an angled shape north and west of Allendale, colored in orange-tan -- the legend said 201-1,000 affected. We were in it. As the hours ran on, I recalled that they pull the repair crews from wire work above like 45-50mph winds for safety.

“High winds throughout the day have challenged our crews, with additional power outages occurring while we worked to restore earlier interruptions. These men and women are focused on working safely in adverse conditions while restoring service to customers as quickly as possible and I thank them for their efforts,” said Garrick Rochow, the utility’s vice president of energy delivery. “We are cautiously optimistic that as the weather improves late tonight and into Saturday, we’ll get the upper hand on the damage caused by this strong storm. We thank our customers for their patience.”

67,000 were still dark when our power came on and the generator started its seven minute cooldown cycle. Some 144,000 total customers since 4am.

Sorry, Charter

Charter Communications, our cable company, keeps suggesting that it's dumb to depend on the phone company's DSL for Internet. By 8:45pm, though, our cable kept getting interrupted. If we used a cable modem, we wouldn't be watching reruns of Sherlock on Netflix streaming.

We have a much more reliable local Allendale telephone company than any cable company I've ever dealt with. Pthhhhhbt!

Dr. Phil

Back From Past The Howling Steppes Of Siberia...

When Mrs. Dr. Phil came in after scooping, she reported that she'd managed to make it out to the road. But there was no mail or newspaper at 3:45pm-ish. Not too surprising, actually. But the daily e-mail digest from the Grand Rapids Press said that though the papers were printed, they couldn't be sure of delivery today, so they were making the e-print version of today's paper available for free.

Now that's rather resourceful and clever of them. Good call. As a result, I've already printed today's Sudoku. (grin)


Shot from the steps inside the garage, so I wouldn't track in stuff on my shoes. (grin)

The snow is 8-12" deep down the driveway, and being quite dry because of the cold is actually pretty light stuff. In theory if John doesn't get here with his blade, I think I could make it out of here in 4WD and carve a 2nd tire track in the snow. But hopefully we won't have to test that theory. (double-grin)

Dr. Phil

IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD

Well, the weather people in West Michigan have been hyping this winter storm for nearly a week. Fact is, nearly every storm which has clobbered the Midwest west of here or clobbered the East Coast repeatedly, has ended up going around West Michigan. Oh sure, right on the lakeshore there have been multiple one- to two-foot snowfalls. But much of the prevailing lake effect bands have been running down Lake Michigan, north to south, and Allendale is located inside the "waist" of Michigan, so we just haven't gotten all that much snow. Alas, it's really been too warm, so we've got a lot of ice.

By Sunday, which started off a beautiful sunny day, the National Weather Service chimed in and issued the first Winter Storm Advisories for Tuesday night and Wednesday -- and the magic word "blizzard" popped out. And the hype machine was on. Storm forecasts of 12"-14" are now 14"-18". And on Tuesday, they moved up the warnings from 7pm to 5pm.

I don't remember where I was on US-131 coming home on Tuesday, but at 5:02pm the snow started. Before that I was just dealing with icy roads and gusty crosswinds. Mrs. Dr. Phil posted on Facebook that "5:10 pm -- home, no sign of snow all day long. 5:27 pm -- OMG! It's snowing sideways, can't see out to the road!"

Yeah, the blizzard is actually here.

Everybody's Doing It

I warned my students that if the storm followed Track A and not Track B, then I probably couldn't make it to K-zoo on Wednesday -- and with drifting might not be able to make it out of the driveway. (grin) By noon, or so, I updated my class webpages and canceled Wednesday's classes and office hours.

Grand Valley State University canceled their evening classes on Tuesday and all classes on Wednesday. Kalamazoo College closed for tomorrow, but part of their campus is on narrow streets on a hill -- I had to go there once after a snow storm, parking was impossible. And Kalamazoo Valley Community College closed early, but KVCC is just off of I-94 and is very exposed and always gets creamed by the snow.

My university? Western Michigan University did what it always does -- posted on their homepage that WMU rarely closes and here's why. They even provided a list of closures:

Weather-related WMU closings since 1999

1999, Jan. 4-5--Heavy snowfall delayed the start of spring semester.
2000, Nov. 21-22--Thanksgiving recess began Tuesday because of snow.
2006, Dec. 1--An ice storm downed trees, caused power outages.
2007, Feb. 5--Extreme cold and snow closed many Michigan colleges.
2008, Feb. 1--WMU closed due to snow.
2009, Dec. 10--Blizzard conditions closed WMU.

Funny thing, about half the time I cancel classes because the forecasts say the roads are for shit, WMU ends up agreeing with me. They've even stayed open when they should've closed and caught hell for it, then canceled classes the next day, which turned out to be not bad at all. Go figure.

However...

Around 10pm WMU bowed to the inevitable:


So along with most of the rest of Michigan's Lower Peninsula, we'll both be having a snow day.

The bad news is that the blizzard conditions will persist to as late as 7pm. With drifting, clearing our 250-foot driveway may not be useful.

Probably need to find someone with a plow to come by once on Wednesday and once on Thursday.

Be safe, all those of you who are in either the snow dump or ice coating zones of this storm.

Dr. Phil