The following was written on July 19, 11PM.
This evening we had a big storm here in St. Louis. When I walked out of the door at the TKD place at Woodson plaza, the sky was full of black clouds and the wind is blowing hard. I hesitated for a minute and decided to drive back home anyway. I saw some trees being split by the wind. And the power was out at our condo. Since everything in my condo is powered by electricity. I pretty much can not do anything. My roommate came back from work shortly. Since we are out of power, the only thing we can do is chat, which ispretty nice because we don’t have much time to talk. He does lots of trips recently for work.
I called my Chinese friends to see if they have power. They are in the same boat as mine. So we went out to search for food. MCD and Subway, IMO all are busy now. Luckily we get in Sunway although they closed at 9, they are nice enough to let us in.There are lots of fire trucks running around. But no luck in power as of now (11 PM). I will go to bed now.
The following was written on July 20, 8 PM.
I left some lights on when I went to bed. During the night the lights went on and off couple times and never sustained. In the morning I went to two Panera Bread stores and both are out of power. Many traffic lights are also down and it caused delays. From radio I heard it is the biggest power outage in St. Louis in many years: half a million people are out of power. I believe St. Louis region has about 2.3 million people. The bad thing is it is also the hottest days, the high temp reaches 100F.
Luckily my home got power back today. From the TV news I heard they restored about 1/4 of the power, I felt very lucky compared to people still live without power.In retrospect, I don’t have a good contingency plan for those things. A few weeks ago I laughed at a friend when we talked about the preparation for those kinds of emergency situtaions – thought it was unnecessary.