Electricity

 I don't know how much it was national news, but tropical storm Isaias basically wiped out the electrical grid in Connecticut. Many towns were pretty much 100% without power, mine among them. The electric company failed to prepare for the storm, and it took them a solid week to get most customers service restored, and as of this writing, 9 days later, some are still waiting.

I got my power back after almost exactly 7 days. I don't know if I can adequately describe what an ordeal that was. All of us out here get our water from wells, and no electricity means no water. I had stashed a five gallon jerry can with water for toilet flushing etc., and I could refill my potable water bottle at my neighbors' house, who have a generator. But I couldn't bathe, shave, or clean anything. I charged my devices at the neighbors' in the mornings, but only got about an hour use of my computer each day, so I couldn't really work. All I could do at night was read by flashlight. I couldn't irrigate my garden, it's been very dry here, so the garden suffered. (The tropical storm gave us plenty of wind but not much rain.) Yesterday, I had to toss the entire contents of my refrigerator on the compost heap. Some of it, I couldn't even tell what it was.

Now, if you think about it, electricity can't possibly be a necessity, right? I don't know when it first made it out here but probably not until 1920 or so. People managed to cook, eat, defecate, clean and bathe as well as operate their farms and offices. But of course everything was set up to make that possible. They had hand-pumped wells, wood or coal-fired cookstoves, mechanical typewriters, kerosene lamps, outhouses, they ate fresh vegetables from their own or neighbors farms during the harvest season and lived off canned goods, root cellars, and the occasional slaughtered livestock the rest of the year. 

But now it's impossible to live without it. You're forced to adapt eventually -- Puerto Ricans who were without power for the better part of a year after hurricane Maria managed to survive, but  it must have been damn hard. One week was more than enough for me. I'm buying a standby generator, which is expensive, but I can't go through this again. (A small portable generator from Home Depot wouldn't do the job for me because it couldn't operate the well pump, refrigerator and range, let alone give me any additional circuits.) But a lot of people, most actually, can't afford that. So they'll just have to suffer through the next storm.