Blogtrek

Ice Storms

We had a snowstorm followed by an ice storm this week, coating all the branches with ice. It did not affect our power much, causing only one or two glitches of a fraction of a second. But it caused a lot of power outages in the Carolinas. Some people don't have power for a week. For them it was like the Great Ice Storm of 1998 December 24 for us which gave us a 21-hour power outage.

The question is why ice storms come with such large number of power outages. It is because trees fall on power lines. Many of our power lines are aerial, on endless sequences of TTTTT that line highways through the countryside. If there are trees nearby, then they could fall on these power lines. It seems to me that electric companies could do a better job of keeping trees away from power lines, and of making power lines that withstand weight better. Trees are not intelligent creatures, and they don't want to harm us. Terrorists are intelligent and they want to harm us. If falling trees can take hundreds of thousands of people out of power for a week, think of what terrorists can do. This is something the power utilities need to do something about. The worst of ice storms should cause no more than a few hundred outages.