No Power

The power in my home went out Saturday night around 9 PM. It’s now 1:30 PM Monday and the power is still out. I’m being told that it may be out until Thursday.

Trees are down, roads are closed and in general Northern New Jersey has debris scattered all over the place. I have a piece of someone’s siding in my back yard; the cell phone service is spotty at best and as of this AM, I had no regular phone service.

Basically this sucks.

The road closings were the biggest headache. My daughter’s car broke down in the city of all places. For a price ($275 to be exact) we got her towed to a repair place not too far from home. I went to meet her and found out all the roads I usually take leading in that direction were closed. The first two I tried I could see the blockages. On the third one I decided to go around the barricade and almost met a very large tree up close and personal.

The tree was blocking both sides of the road, which sort of explained the closure and the barricade, but there was just enough room to get under it with branches scrapping the top of my car. Once I retrieved my daughter, and paid for her tow, I had to swing all the way north in order to get back home since I wasn’t going to play with that tree again.

We also haven’t been able to reach the repair place so even if they’re open, they have no idea what that white Liberty is doing there.

The early stages of the Hackensack River winds around the houses two blocks from where I live and it overflowed flooding the houses along the river up to the front yard. It’s the worst I’ve seen since the county installed a retaining wall to prevent that. The river went right up over the wall. What an absolute mess.

Not everywhere is out. Some folks have had power through the whole deal; others have already had it restored. I’m not all that thrilled that it’s going to take four days to restore mine but there’s not a whole hell of a lot I can do about it either.

I still have gas service so at least I have hot water but that could fail as well. Drinking water, on the other hand, is a tad iffy and folks are being told to boil it just in case, something I didn’t know this morning when I took my pills so I’ll probably come down with bubonic plague or something.

During little aberrations like this you realize how much you depend upon the conveniences of modern life. I often wonder how well we would all fare if things really went to hell.

Imagine no power, no phone service, no natural gas or heating oil, no gasoline for your car, no clean water and no food being delivered to local supermarkets. Add to that a collapse of basic services such as fire and police. What would we do?