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Comment by throwaway173738 | Hacker News Reader

In other words most of the US outside of a major metro area. I’ve lived various places in Western Washington and the advice about generators and food and batteries and heat ring true everywhere more than an hour away from Seattle or Tacoma

I would add that you should have a backup plan for preparing any holiday meal using a camping stove because the power could go out an hour into roasting a turkey. In fact don’t invite anyone over unless you’ve confirmed ahead of time that they don’t mind sleeping in the same room, together with your family, in front of the wood stove. This could happen even on a clear day. Don’t rely on the electricity in the winter ever.

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> I’ve lived various places in Western Washington and the advice about generators and food and batteries and heat ring true everywhere more than an hour away from Seattle or Tacoma

I live on the west side of puget sound, and get two nines of utility power. Undergrounding distribution lines is very expensive given the natural expenses of undergrounding and the shallow soil most of the region has. Undergrounding transmission lines is basically not happening outside of very special cases. Shallow soil also makes trees less stable, so that makes treefall -> utility outage more probable. Roads can get pretty nasty in winter storms too which also contributes to high time to repair.

People can say "bad infrastructure" all you want, but nobody wants to pay a lot more to fight geography for one more nine. Also at least in my community, every tree is sacred even though it's all third growth backfill from multiple clear cuts over the past who knows.

Article doesn't even mention cell towers go down in extended outages. Around me, it's about 4-6 hours, a little longer overnight, but only 30 minutes past when people wake up.

> In other words most of the US outside of a major metro area.

Not just outside, I spent 15 years in/around Austin and it got to be ridiculous.

2020 - cleared out the stores at covid.. alright, few people were prepared, none had done it before

2021 - cleared out the stores for the blizzard, lost power for 45min and water for 5 days.. almost no one was prepared, despite the year before

2023 - cleared out the stores for the blizzard, lost power for days due to heavy icing.. some were prepared but not at scale

Some people just don't learn.

Luckily after '20, we prepared. Then in '21, we moved to rural Texas and got solar+battery backup so 2023 wasn't even a blip.

I've lived 40+ years in several places in the northern US, mostly in rural areas and this isn't my experience at all.

I live in a small town in northern Michigan and while we do somewhat regularly have power outages during the winter, it's when we get freezing rain, snow isn't really a problem (and really, I haven't had issues here in town, I'm describing the issues that have hit the region).

In my experience with winter-storm-related power outages, the core problem is often _wind_ rather than precipitation.

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