Blackout

Maybe I shouldn't have made fun of the weather yesterday. Last night the wind speed was between 50 and 77 mph in Seattle and by the coast 90 mph winds were recorder.

The wind was pretty amazing last night and it finally caused the lights to go out a little past 1 a.m. I was surprised they didn't go out sooner since they had been flickering on and off all night long. However, when I went to bed, I wasn't expecting them to still be out in the morning.

When I woke up, I managed to check my email over the phone and find out the entire Microsoft campus was closed due to lack of electricity. Yay, I thought, no work! But then I realized that also meant no hot water, no hot food and no heat. Darn you electricity! When I own a house, Ill have a propane heater and stove.

As I heard the news, I found out that most of Seattle was without electricity and in the surrounding areas about 700,000 (including me) were also without electricity. I heard that several trees had fallen and caused major problems. One of my coworkers had a tree fall on his house and another was helping his neighbor who also had a tree fall on his house. I went out for a while to see if I could find any fallen trees in my area, but they had all been removed. I can't copy pictures form my camera to my phone, so Ill post the image later.

This type of storm is rather uncommon in this part of the country. But apparently it happens about one every ten years. The last time it happened was in 1993, so we were well overdue for one.