Just wanted to let everyone know that the power in my home finally came back last night! It's sooooooo nice having air conditioning, lights, television, and the Internet and computer back up and operating!
No sooner had I done my last post on here (using my PC from work), when power went out at work too!!
This has been the worst power outage in the history of this city! The first wave of heavy storms took out 490,000 homes and businesses in the St. Louis area. That was Wednesday night here. Some people got their power back Thursday night, taking the number of people out of power down to 380,000 by Friday morning (I wasn't lucky enough to have been among those restored yet). My workplace, which had been out of power on Thursday, had it restored for Friday morning. Well, Murphy's Law prevails, and while I was at work on Friday, the second wave of storms hit, and knocked out power to a grand total of 587,000 homes and businesses! So, those that got their power back for a short while, got knocked out again in many cases, and yet more were taken out!
As I write this from home, there are still 180,000 people without power, and they predict they should all be restored in another day or two if all goes well.
I don't know how much was lost in the way of business with everyone out, but it is surely significant!
On a human toll, we had three people dead, one from electric shock with coming into contact with a live line during debris cleanup, and two from heat causes. We had 30 people injured during a baseball game at Bush Stadium here when windows were popped out of the media booth during the Wednesday night storm. Apparently they didn't hold up to the 92 MPH straight-line winds!
We had lightposts and utility poles ripped right out of the ground, all around the downtown area, uprooted and broken trees up to three feet in diameter also were taken out by these storms! Two buildings downtown collapsed, and one had a wall on one side collapse, throwing bricks in piles up to two feet high on a nearby bridge, shutting it down. Three eighteen-wheeler trucks were overturned on one bridge, and two on another. At the main airport here, St. Louis International Airport (aka Lambert Field... where Charles Lindbergh first took off with the Ryan NYP to ferry it to New York before starting his trans-Atlantic flight), part of the roof of the East Terminal ended up on the highway running in front of the airport terminal!
Never underestimate the power of mother nature! Even without a tornado/cyclone, hurricane, waterspout, flood, earthquake, or other form of heavy-duty event, thunderstorms are capable of much destruction unto themselves.
Glad to be back on here finally!
Thanks to all those who sent messages of empathy and concern! I greatly appreciate it
Also... on the Chicken Gun/Rooster Booster.... I think the situation was that they may not have let the chickens fully thaw. Not that they didn't let them thaw at all. Naturally in any controlled test, you want reproducability, so they were following a routine process, thawing the chicken out for x amount of time, etc. My understanding is that they underestimated how long it can take for the core of a solidly frozen chicken to fully thaw, so it ended up having that end result. I guess they would have benefited by having an engineer or two that also had experience in the kitchen.... but alas.... that's pretty rare! I know I can microwave something... but that's about it for me!
