AFTER THE STORM...HERE COMES THE STORM

Ameren is the electricity provider for the st. louis region and parts of southern/southwestern illinois... so when i say Ameren you will know to whom i am referring...

with my power being out i have had a chance to think about a lot of things... nowhere can you turn in this city and not hear about the number of "customers" without power... these numbers are released by Ameren...

but what Ameren won't so quickly release, is their definition of a "customer"... when i hear 'customer' (and i am sure i am not alone on this) i think "person" - at least in this case... so when Ameren says it is failing to deliver power to 500,000 customers, i think 500,000 people without power... but with Ameren's definition of a customer, i am way off base and the magnitude of the problem becomes apparent and shocking when i translate an Ameren "customer" into a person...

Ameren defines a "customer" as a meter... so if you, billybob, aunt sue and uncle jeb all live under the same roof, you are all one Ameren "customer" because there is only one meter on the house... with this definition, it is easy to see how the numbers of affected can be easily down played...

here is a more accurate representation of the number of people affected:

according to the census of the metro area, there are approximately 1,013,341 household and 2,725,000 persons - an average of 2.69 people per household...

according to Ameren, during the peak of the storm, 341,000 household "customers" in the metro area were without electricity... when you apply the people per household factor you get 917,000 souls without electricity... 341,000 "Ameren 'customers'" vs 917,000 real people - that is a huge difference... basically one third of the metro's population was without electricity, but you would not have guessed that from Ameren's figures...

when the storms of July 2006 occured, Ameren had 700,000 "customers" without electricity - that's 1.88 million people without electricity... nearly 70% of the metro's population...

this is the second major outage in 6 months (and since i don't have the actual figures i won't include major outages from last year - i belive it is four over the last two years)... now, Ameren is asking people to be patient while it tries to restore power...

if you have ever experienced a st. louis summer, then you have sat in an oven waiting for your blood to boil... it is hot here in the summer...conversely, if you experience a true st. louis winter you will yearn for the blood boiling heat of summer (fall and spring usually miss us - we go from extreme to extreme)...

given this, how do you tell people who sweltered during the summer outage, and are now shivering in the cold, that they should be patient?... especially considering, that you are going to raise your rates, your weak infrastructure only exascerbate problems such as outages, you have cut back on the maintenance needed to temper the effects of a storm and you are the only provider of power in the area?...

i hope Ameren, your storm is yet to come....

WHERE I LAY MY HEAD, THAT'S MY HOME

the warmth, peace and tranquility of my home has been disturbed by mother nature... she has reminded me that i am at her mercy, and as such a mere pawn on her chess board...

on Thursday 11-30-06 she rained snow, ice and thunder on my home... she broke branches from the trees in my yard, tossing one on the roof of my outdoor shed causing it frown... the snow she brought piled up on my drive way and on top of my vehicles (as my luck would have it, my garage door is broken)...

i shoveled her frozen tears from the drive way and wiped away those that fell on my truck... she must have cried a lot because her tears froze into a two inch deep sheet of ice...

so far, i have been understanding of her pain, but she felt the need to further convince me... this time she took another branch and threw it onto the power line, thereby cutting off the power to several homes, including my own...

during the summer, St. Louis suffered a major power outage that lasted for several days (some people did not have their power restored for 2 weeks)... i escaped that hit and never lost power at all... this time i wasn't so lucky... i have been away from my house for the past three days and two nights, and there are no estimates on when power will be restored...

but i still count my blessings... i have migrated to the security of my office/lab... i have a cot on which to sleep, heat, and warm water... currently i am sharing this space with co-workers... we have opened the doors to those who are less fortunate and invited them to come inside... my brother who owns a restaurant has been feeding us... (being here has given me an opportunity to get caught up on a lot of paperwork - i can't remember ever getting to work this early)...

for those who are less fortunate and have no or limited choices, i cannot begin to feel their pain... my thoughts are with the elderly and those that are shut in... i have a list of elderly people who we will be supplying with food today... my thoughts go back to the days when i would get off work at 12:30 a.m., go to a nearby White Castles or Popeyes Chicken and purchase a family sized box of chicken or burgers... i would then trek to a nearby spot where i know of homeless people sleeping on the sidewalk and offer this food to them... some would take the offering, others would refuse it and others would want to know for which agency/shelter do i work...

my current situation has forced me to give more thoughts to things that i would normally put off for a later time, or things that i took very lightly... i expect for my room to be illuminated when i flip the light switch... i expect to find a cold pitcher of water in my refrigerator... i expect my Hagen Daaz rum and raisin ice cream to be sitting at the front of the freezer waiting for my greetings when i open the freezer door... now that ice cream has probably lost its ice and is now cream... but am i worried about it?... nope...

as i look outside, i am reminded of how tiny i am when compared to the rest of the world... i am elated that nature is truly a mother - the same hands that cradle, guide and protect me, are the same hands that slap me back to reality...