Sunday afternoon my little neighborhood experienced a heavy thunderstorm - unusually heavy winds and a violent torrent of rain, but still a thunderstorm - that passed through the area in less than 30 minutes but put out the electrical grid to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses for 10 hours (in my case) or even longer. This was only the longest of three recent power outages, all of three hours or more, over the past two weeks. Two were weather-related, the third was somebody driving into a utility pole.
In addition, we've experienced at least two blips in the same period, of the sort that punch out the power just long enough to shut down computers and cause the waste of 15-20 minutes rebooting, logging in again, and the like. I wish this performance were rare, but power outages occur where I live on the average of one or two a month. The electric company's reporting number should be on speed dial, but by now, I have it memorized anyway.
The constant interruption of power supplies, even by fairly normal weather or routine traffic accidents, has several causes, but primary among them is simply our failure as a society to protect power lines by burying them. Here as in other endeavors, a business's short-term cost considerations are allowed to overrule sensible public policy. No one has found a way yet to deliver electric power wirelessly; until we do, it only makes sense to update our infrastructure to minimize the potential for disruption.
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