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If you've been digging hard or just surfing the web recently, you might (1 in 10,000) have found a news article passed around by the AP, that spoke of a small power outage in the midwest. It took some digging for me, I don't really expect CNN, FOX or any of the other corporate controlled network news outlets to care about the outage, in fact the only thing that might be somewhat attractive in the story is that hotels/motels within a 60 mile radius of St. Louis have 0 vacancies...

Well, I like to complain. And the last time I was allowed to complain was maybe Wednesday or Tuesday, anywhoo it was a while ago. And I think it was on the topic of my A/C being broken. Yeah, whatever.

Wednesday night, about 7:20pm maybe, a storm rolled in, it came strangely from the northwest down through the metro area and down south. Only a handful of similar storms have been recorded coming from the north in the past 75 years. Whatever, I shrugged the storm off because we were only given a 30% chance of rain, which in St. Louis means "it' ain' t gonna happen."

It happened. It pretty much tore up the city. I was near the ballpark when it blew in, which I must say, it did in the most frightening manner I'd ever experienced. The game was about to start, evidently the umps called it a delay to wait out the storm, that took 2 hours. Some windows/press boxes were blown open and onto the stands below, a dip'n'dots stand was torn apart and landed in left-field...that was comical.

Then, the trees. The wind speed was reported as being up to 70-90 mph. Category 1 Hurricane speeds, they basically uprooted every tree in Forest Park, and demolished the St. Louis Arch grounds....but really, what kind of idiotic planning went into the Arch landscaping...they forgot that Bradford Pear Trees are favorite targets of T-storms, which put into reality you can imagine the damage at the Arch...no you can't but I'll say it was about 55% destroyed, walking around it looked like a battlefield.

The same with every county, township in the other st. louis metro districts. Trees uprooted, fallen, houses and cars demolished from fallen trees. It was really scary looking, but most of the nation doesn't know that because 500,000 people without power isn't a big deal.

That's another thing, power. I've been out of it since the storm hit, Wednesday night. That's fine with me, I get by. My laundry shop has an old wine cellar below that I sleep in, it gets about 70 degrees down there....but its the elderly that make problems. Power out, elderly unchecked, and you get death. The national guard was sent in, the governor and president have declared the area in a state of emergency/disaster zone...supposedly that does something, money allocated or something like that....whatever.

Storms hit us again yesterday morning. Now st. louis city, counties, and now east st. louis and border towns in illinois are out of power....so we go from 450,000 without power to about 570,000 without power, which means the utility company (Ameren UE) won't be fixing someones power, and will be distracted with the Illinois customers now.

Whatever.

I had to clean out my fridge. That's okay, only about $16 in food and drink in there, but my heart medicine that needs to be refriderated got soiled...that sucks...

You might think I'm an idiot, I could of just ran and gotten ice. Well unless I wanted to travel out to the capital or 70 miles into the boonies, I won't find any ice. Its all out. The grocerie stores...they're all running on generators and low stocks...that really bites. I checked my email today, I had 3204 emails, 5634 junk emails, and that was just in one of my hotmail accounts, about 534 of them were important.

Damn.

People in the northern counties have to refrain from drinking the tap water, they have to boil their water first because some of the treatment plants got damaged, well thats fine but what about those with electric stoves...those people are somewhat lucky though...their towns are newer than the cities....they buried their utility wires, thats really smart because in the southern/western counties as well as parts of the city (80%) we have above ground wires, well those get trees fallen upon them...that dampens efforts.

Lucky northern bastards.


I'm kind of mad now. I've resorted to fast food recently, luckily my water heater is gas, I'd of died without a hot shower....I'm getting by on volunteer work---helping drop off water, deliver food, and clean up brush...thats nice.

Do you have power? I hear NYC doesn't but I guess 25,000 people are more important than 500,000 bumpkins in the midwest...I'm getting sick of being ignored. Kind of like New Orleans, 2 weeks of coverage and then they leave, what does it take?