In hindsight, now that the power has been back on in our Northern Virginia townhouse for a couple of days after last Friday's devastating storm, I must say that the 100-plus degree heat wasn't the worst thing about being without electricity and air conditioning. Oh, believe me, sleeping on sheets that are hot to the touch is no fun. But it was the unexpected things that nearly broke me after three days without power during the summer's meanest heat wave. Here's what I will have the harshest memories about relating to the blackout of 2012.
1. My neighbor running a gas-powered generator 10 feet from our open windows. The noise was deafening. He was the only one in our townhouse community who had the nerve to run a generator in a tight, multi-family building area. We walked through the single-family area of our subdivision and saw generators placed on the far edge of one-acre lots where the noise wouldn't impact neighbors so severely, but not a single condo or townhouse owner, other than our next door neighbor, had a generator. Most condo/townhouse people had enough courtesy and commonsense to not blow out their neighbors' ear drums with the constant roar of a portable generator, which sounds similar to one of those large, industrial lawn mowers. To add insult to injury, our neighbor bought a window air conditioner so that he could close up his house and not deal with his own noise and polluting fumes.
2. People driving through intersections that had dark traffic lights without even slowing down was fairly common. When traffic lights are out, we are taught to treat intersections as four-way stops. However, in Northern Virginia, powerless traffic lights seem to mean something very different to half the drivers who I saw. In fact, I nearly got rear-ended several times by people who I guess wanted me to blow through the intersections.
3. Paying $60 for a cooler that probably didn't cost half of that pre-blackout. Yup, good old capitalism was rearing its ugly head all around the D.C. region. A hotel in College Park, Md., not exactly a garden spot, was charging $500 for a room. Gas stations were hiking up prices 50 cents and more. The grocery store that was supposed to be giving out free bags of ice, according to radio reports, was actually charging $2.00.
4. I will admit it, I missed my gadgets, my Internet connection, my ability to play electric guitar to relieve stress. Couldn't watch a ball game on television. There was only one radio news station with 24/7 coverage and I had to listen to it through a 1980s battery-powered boom box that I fortunately had buried in a closet years ago. I will never listen to that station or boom box again. Never want to hear another commercial or incompetent reporting.
5. Viewing people in less clothing than they would/should normally wear. I will leave it at that.
Overall, I give the people of Northern Virginia a C-minus in dealing with this crisis. The level of courtesy and pulling together was lower than I expected. This isn't an overly friendly area to begin with, but as a native New Yorker, I was kind of hoping that an emergency would bring out the best in people. While New Yorkers are often known for their rudeness, they do seem to be at their best when the "s" hits the fan in snow storms and other emergencies. I saw little evidence of that here, however.
Thousands are still without power on this Fourth of July. I feel for them. I am grateful that mere annoyances were the toughest things I had to deal with, but I am also disappointed by the every-person-for-him-or-herself attitude displayed by so many Virginians this week. Maybe more than being a reflection of a geographic area, it's a sign of the times we live in.
