Made it through

Well, we made it through the 2nd round of the snowpocalypse without losing power (at least not yet…of course I’m sure as I’m writing this we will lose power due to some freak occurrence…or maybe not). I’m worried about my bee hives in the back yard…I’ll need to go out there tomorrow to check to see that they’re up and the upper escape is not covered with snow. I’m also not looking forward to round two of the big cleanup — maybe this time I’ll be able to get my snowblower working and I won’t have to shovel…and then again, maybe not.

All I can say is that I’m tired of the snow for now. A friend sent me this picture and all I can say it that it definitely sums up my feelings about snow for now:

Enough Snow!

Getting Ready for Round 2

Power was finally restored sometime early this morning — possibly around 3 AM. We have been slowly getting caught up on chores and other things as we get ready to rumble for round 2 of the “Snowpocalypse”/”Snowmageddon”. One thing I’ve had to do was restore the network (which wasn’t so bad). The thing that irked me the most, though, was that we lost power around 9PM on Friday February 5th 2010 — on Shabbat — when I couldn’t go into DR mode and shutdown the servers cleanly. So, they all crashed even though I do have them all on UPSs. I need to sit down and finish that shutdown script that I’ve been meaning to write so that when one starts to shutdown it signals to the others to shutdown as well.

Recovery of the network took about 45 minutes as the Windows 2003 servers had to check AD — and because they had to check AD, DNS — which is integrated into AD in my home domain — was unavailable for a while. The good news is that all the servers recovered cleanly and network services were restored. Hopefully we won’t see a repeat of the power outage from the last storm and things will be much smoother…(he says as he knocks on the wood desk).

Winter Storm 2010

So the big storm is now gone (has been for about 48 hours) but in its wake it left our street without power. We lost power about 9 PM on Friday night and we stuck it out at home until Sunday afternoon. The irritating issue is that PEPCO has indicated that the majority of the customers in the Montgomery County Maryland service area could have power by tomorrow night. However, when I check PEPCO’s outage map it indicates that our outage may not be fixed until Friday evening at 6PM.

This is REALLY annoying. It seems that PEPCO has restored power to about 80% of those who lost power in the storm at this point. Why then is it going to take them four days to resolve the final 20% of the outages? Ours is simply a downed high voltage line and a transformer…I’ve seen them repair that problem in just a couple of hours in the past. Also, given the number of crews they have out in the field you’d think they could finish the work sooner rather than later.

The other annoying thing is how the plow crews have done a relatively poor job in clearing University Blvd. There are long stretches where it looks like the plows haven’t even been there. I realize that they have a very hard job but the level of effort, especially on a major road like University Blvd, appears very low. I also know from a friend that there plows yesterday who were going up and down Kemp Mill Rd plowing it over and over again – even though there was no snow left on the road – and were told by their dispatchers to continue doing so even though there were many side streets that hadn’t been plowed at all (including mine which is a Montgomery County Public School bus route). When my friend asked the plow driver why they weren’t plowing the side streets he was told that the dispatchers were telling the drivers to “stick to the plan” even though they were reporting that all the snow had been removed. When he asked the driver why they just wouldn’t act on their own the driver replied “You don’t like it? Move!” Unbelievable. No wonder the state is over budget on clearing snow given their inefficiency.