Accidental Blogger

Today is the sixth consecutive day that our house is without electricity. We are minimally functional with borrowed electricity from our neighbors through an extension cord. After six days, I am getting used to it and learning to improvise around the limited access to electricity – a situation which would otherwise have been a debilitating handicap. All of us can imagine the difficulty of leading a normal daily routine in which almost every household implement comes on with the flick of a switch or the push of a button.  But those who are really "plugged in"  will appreciate this article by a young and thoroughly wired person. No, the lament here is not for hot food, hot tea or coffee, not even light or air conditioning. Some people, (that also includes adults like my husband), feel most hampered by their electronic gadgetry going dark and silent.

My life, and maybe yours, is bathed in a blue-green electronic glow. When the flat-screen TV isn’t on, the laptop is. The BlackBerry goes everywhere, and so does the iPod. My books are loaded onto an electronic reading device, a Kindle. I Twitter.

I check my friends’ progress on Facebook. Many of the people I Twitter or have as Facebook friends I’ve never met, probably never will meet. But I follow them going to work, unable to sleep, angry in traffic, naming new babies. They’re part of my life.

Unplug me and I die a little.

During Ike, the rules changed. Sure, some of us tried to plan ahead for electronic catastrophe, charging the cell phones, buying wrong-size batteries and trying to dig up that totally retro non-cordless phone, but sometimes even that wasn’t good enough.

After the storm, cell phone service was at best spotty, at worst nonexistent.

Sure, there was battery life in the laptop good enough for a DVD or two, but who remembered that the wireless router was electric too? (Not me.) A camera wasn’t much good with an uncharged battery. Cock your ear, and you could hear the collective keening of tweens whose Nintendo DS or PSP had run out of juice.

I noticed that the writer of the piece mentions some old-fashioned gizmos which came in awfully handy during our marooned hours right after Ike blew by. Most households these days have cordless or cell phones (many of the younger generation don’t bother with land lines at all). The former doesn’t work without electricity and the latter is useless when the cell towers are hit. Ike, like other big storms, damaged both. But our land phone line didn’t go down during the rampage. I found a fifteen year old corded phone in a closet (the type you can’t use while walking around the house) which proved to be the life line during the 24 hours after the storm and continues to be so in our lengthy "powerless" state. We also found an old shortwave radio in my son’s room. It worked for a while on batteries but then broke down. My husband spent better part of last Saturday in the garage, sitting in the car listening to the radio and charging his lap top.

While the above article is lighthearted in an Erma Bombeck kind of way, the following one by Richard Parker, professor of journalism at UT Austin, takes a somber look at what a storm the size of Ike really costs a huge city like Houston, located so close to an ever warming body of water.

An excerpt:

[it] is the ensuing pitch black that envelops more than 2 million people and 600 square miles that reveals something not just about Houston, but about Texas, and even America. We aren’t so much addicted to oil as hooked on the tumultuous relationship where money, oil and the obsessive cycle of the boom and the bust all collide. It’s a rollicking love affair and yet it seems doomed; it’s just too hard, too costly, too painful.

The visible evidence is dramatic enough: the Galveston oceanfront smashed into matchsticks, the stilted homes of the Bolivar Peninsula ripped from their pilings. There’s that boat wedged under the house in Bayou Vista. And in downtown Houston, Interstate 10 is gracelessly lined by crumpled gas stations, shorn billboards, smashed roof lines and shattered skyscraper windows.

But the storm’s truest self lies in the enormous economic and financial cost. After all, as we joke in Austin, nobody comes to Houston for the quality of life. Houston is all about the opportunity, the money, the rush. The city is the undisputed petroleum capital of the world, home to the graceful homes of River Oaks and the big box prairie of Tomball. Now it is home to the third-most-expensive natural disaster in U.S. history (behind only Hurricanes Katrina and Andrew).

Yes, in Texas everything is big and something this big can ultimately be untenable. The cost of the storm is between $6 billion and $16 billion, according to federal estimates; private industry estimates say $8 billion to $18 billion. The irony is that just as Houston is the undisputed petroleum capital of the globe, rising sea temperatures are making gulf hurricanes more intense, according to the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

And the cost will only rise in the years to come. Houston didn’t used to be so big but like the rest of the coastal United States it has swollen to expose ever larger numbers of people to ever-larger storms. The coastal population has soared by 57 percent since 1960 and jumped more than 200 percent in some places. As a result, some financial risk managers expect the claims from gulf hurricanes to rise 40 percent in the coming years.