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points by snickerbockers 1 day ago | 0 comments
This is one of those things that happens in rural areas, "the city" (which is not actually a city in any sense but the legal one) gets power on in a day or so but your neighborhood 10 miles away doesn't get power for another week because the population density is something like 50/sq mile at most. And that's just for the people in actual neighborhoods, if you're on a farm or something where the nearest neighbor is a mile down the highway I don't even know how long it takes them to fix your power lines.
[–] uxp100 1 day ago
I grew up in the country, just not far from a town of 2000, but had friends who were more remote, and my power is, well not exactly less reliable now that I’m in the city, but not necessarily better. They would have power to my house or my friends house back pretty quick. Longest I remember was maybe 4 hours. We’ve had 36 hour outages in the city (more than half a million people). I do think we had more outages in the country, but never very long. Structure of the distribution network? Ease of accessing the lines?
[–] colechristensen 1 day ago
>Structure of the distribution network? Ease of accessing the lines?

Ice storms/blizzards in the upper midwest can last days and make roads impassible to the point where they can't/don't fix the very many downed lines until the storm passes enough that they don't have to deprioritize rural roads and outages.

It's just not safe/possible to fix a line downed by ice when it's -30 out in blizzard conditions even if the trucks could navigate the roads.

This turns into the occasional several day outage for some folks.

I've also lived in parts of cities that essentially were impossible to have power failures absent very local equipment failures (like the power equipment attaching my building to the grid failing once) because the lines were underground and there was a power plant very close by.

It depends on a lot of things and lots of people assume everywhere else is just like where they are.