October Outages Bring Us Back Together

Robyn Metcalfe
Nov 5 · 3 min read

Darkness enveloped my house when the howling wind cut off power to our small village along the coast of Maine last month. As a result of a fallen tree across the main electrical lines outside, I was without water, heat, and lights. Without electricity, our refrigerator and freezer became silent. Ice cream began to spread to the floor of the freezer; milk became tepid. Candles flickered as wind seeped through the window sashes in our kitchen. One morning in October, I had breakfast by candlelight, the soft light softening the steam from a hot espresso. Hand lighting the stove, I managed to find enough bottled water in our pantry to make a hot cup of espresso with a small Moka pot.

While I live in a world where I observe drone-delivered meals, vertical farms, and engineered meat, two power outages that month reminded me that we also exist in a world of paper jams. Our increasing dependence upon technology that relies on electricity puts us in these paradoxical situations: no power to make a phone call to report a power outage.

Thousands of cities across the US lost power in October. The outages were both planned and unplanned outages. PG&E rolled out its plan to cut electric power to over one million California residents in order to mitigate the threat of fires as a result of dry weather. The company had just paid $11 billion in an insurance settlement for a California fire in 2018. It wasn’t about to wait for the next lawsuit.

Residents scattered or found other means to power their homes. While outages caused a general disruption of our lives, one big impact, only reported in general terms, was the loss of food. Consumers were told not to open their refrigerators in order to keep food from spoiling. This approach worked if you lost power for several days, but some residents lost power for over a week; others more. Some of the larger grocery stores and food producers had commercial generators in order to keep perishables fresh. Large grocery chains and some schools and hospitals turned to emergency response plans developed as their disaster relief strategy. Some grocery chains often work with aid organizations such as the Red Cross to plan responses to power outages. In my book, Food Routes, I describe how Walmart provided food and resources in response to Hurricane Katrina.

Many food stores scrambled for smaller generators and gave away food to food banks. Some spoiled food went into dumpsters. A few stores hauled perishable foods to refrigerated trucks in the parking lot. Many stores replaced perishable items with non-perishable goods, such as water, packaged goods, and batteries. Some lost food to looters who took advantage of the chaos resulting from security systems that depended upon power. Without power, the system that feeds us comes to a halt. Even an abundance of electrical generators will eventually run out of fuel.

We are horrified by the news that we waste about a third of the food we produce and we would be shocked to learn how much more food is lost due to power outages alone. Food in schools, food pantries, food usually bought through the SNAP program, all stop flowing to consumers. These infrastructure failures remind us that we still have work to do to make our technology more fluid, resilient, and redundant so that food waste such as occurred in October can be minimized or even eliminated.

After that candlelight breakfast in Maine, I took a walk down our street and found one house with lights blazing, cars in the driveway. The owner of the house is handicapped and has an industrial-sized generator. He opened his doors to neighbors who stopped by for showers and coffee before heading out to work. By the end of the day, still without power, we gathered around his kitchen table for beer and snacks. The outage brought us together, close, asking each other how we could help. While I don’t wish that we lose power more often, this experience reminded me of how connected humans can be, especially at a time when we hear how we are divided and disconnected. When the lights came back on, I felt a twinge of regret. But it did remind me that I could go over to my neighbor’s house without the excuse of a power outage….just for pure connection and friendship.

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