(Originally written on December 15th 2006. Still don’t have Cable  but Verizon EVDO  has been  up)

It’s been a tad breezy in the Puget Sound the last couple days if you hadn’t heard…

Winds at 70+ Mph and over a million people without power last night. Good times all around.

I’ve heard that its down to 400,000 people without power as of writing this. Our power went out at about 10PM last night and we recently got it back about an hour ago, so a little over 24 hours without electricity. Some outlying areas aren’t expected to get power for another 3 or more days. Fun. (Update: some areas aren’t expected to get power till Christmas)

Luckily we weren’t hit by any trees, though one neighbor’s dining room got clobbered and another lost a fence. Additionally, a tree fell across the road farther up the drive so the neighbors were demolishing the fallen pine with a hacksaw and a sledgehammer this morning. Driving around, just about every neighborhood had trees haphazardly strewn about. Bellevue’s “Don’t Cut Down The Trees” policy probably didn’t help matters.

It’s surprising how much havoc happens when the juice stops flowing. For some reason I thought all the gas stations worked off (pneumatic?) pressure to pump the gas. Turns out they use electricity to pump it. No electrons, no liquid dinos.  Finding gas was one of the epic struggles of the people today. Some gas stations that got power back or had a generator, had lines that were 3+ hours long. Some people couldn’t go that far and had to ditch there cars along the sides of the road.

At least I finally got a reason to use my kinetic energy powered flashlight, so everything has a positive. We stopped at a Costco that had power and the flashlights and batteries were flying off the shelves. Besides the lighting, the pizza and other pre-heated Costco goodness were selling like well, hotcakes.