This recommendation from Jay Golter in Virginia. The idea is to provide us all with more sound reasons for being prepared to live without some of the essentials for a while. Some in Canada found they had to do that for 3 weeks in the winter. A whole lot of them couldn't do it and were forced to take refuge in shelters.

This article in Wired Magazine online, "Powerless" (recommended to me by Jerry Poje), provides details of how the prolonged power outages during the 1997 ice storm in Canada affected the people there. The description of the problems at one school shelter alone should be enough to convince anyone that, even if it were physically possible for "the authorities" to provide for everyone in a worst case scenario (it isn't), such accommodations are the last place you would want to put your family. The article is online at:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.04/blackout_pr.html

You may also be interested in reading "Wanda and the Ice Storum," one person's short, pretty good little account of what life was like in norhtern New York at that time.

-- Bill (billdale@lakesnet.net), April 29, 1999