The joy of living in a four season location means that I always have variety. The weather even varies within a season which can be interesting, but also dangerous and annoying for some. Recently the Midwest has been hit with several winter storms including ice and what they call a "winter mix" which consists of ice, rain, sleet, and snow. The great part about this is that it is our first winter in a house (that we own) so we get to shovel, chop, and scrape. I'm not sick of it yet, but I will mention that we had ice an inch and a half thick on our driveway. We finally got it all off after three weeks thanks to some warm days.
So getting to the point of this post is the hazards of storms like the ones we have seen this year. Not only are the streets and sidewalks dangerous to drive and walk on, but the heavy ice and rain that freezes can cause power outages. We have been quite lucky and haven't lost power yet (knock on wood), but several of my relatives and co-workers have not been so fortunate. A few weeks ago we had a particularly crappy day weather-wise and very few people actually made it in to my work. I was able to make it in safely thanks to the awesome bus drivers here, but I kept an eye on the weather the whole time I was in. The tools that I used to keep up on the latest status included the following:
1) weather.com - the radar is pretty awesome and accurate. That day in particular was pretty scary seeing the long path of white (snow) and pink (mix/ice). The thing I really like about this map is that it moves with time so you can see where the storm is heading.
2) KCRG - This is our local news channel, not extremely helpful, but I can count on them listing announcements if things get really bad (read: "news worthy").
and finally,
3) Alliant's electrical outage summary - this doesn't say exactly where or which customers in each county are out of power, but if the count is particularly high in your area, it can alert you to the possibility of your house or business place being affected.
Also note that Ryan pointed out the "Report your outage" link at the bottom of the page. If you don't have electricity, how in the world are you going to have the ability to use that link? Just call it in yo!
So what other sites are useful in these situations?
2 comments:
Really, about the only thing that storms truly affect (other than severely annoying me) is school.
Thankfully, our school has an automated system that will call me with any weather related events (why couldn't our schools do that 20 years ago?).
As for the report an outage link, my computer and DSL modem are both on a UPS, whereas my phones are not . So, for me it would be just as simple to click. Yes, I have a cell phone too, but if I went to lookup the number online, I could just click from there.
Yes, another opportunity to talk about my alarm clock idea for college students. I had this idea as an over-tired college student. Have an alarm clock connected to the Internet. Have it smart enough to know that if classes are cancelled, or even delayed 2 hours, it should not go off at 6 in the morning and LET ME SLEEP!
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