Power came back on again.
Will it stay on for the whole night and still be up tomorrow? Your guess is as good as mine.
@torvalds We had a couple of brief outages today; maybe reclosers? Once this morning which dropped the net and let me escape a meeting, so it's not all bad, right?
@torvalds Having the same debate in Portland myself. Let's hope that power stays on from here, shall we?
That took about two and a half hours. I have corrected my profile name to match.
@torvalds my guess is there will be more brief outages as they're trying to fix the power for remaining locations, and some of the work.can't be done online
@torvalds heh, maybe install Solar panels with batteries to be more independent from the grid? I'd get if that'd be way too expensive, though.
@bufalo1973 @ErikUden @torvalds Electricity is fine, but how would one get the Internet if the whole infra is torn?
@torvalds When, in my life, would I ever get a chance to call Linus Torvalds a "deluded monkey"? I will tell my grandchildren of this day...
@torvalds Oh nooooooooo!
I was in Texas for the 2021 freeze, so I'm a bit of a pessimist about grid reliability now...
@torvalds my friends in SW Portland have now had electricity for 24 hours total in the past week. It’s bleak out there. Stay warm!
@torvalds did they ever consider routing the cables underground to avoid the falling tree problem?
@cwayne @torvalds But I mean, they must've known when they built the grid that certain areas are susceptible to this. Or the weather conditions changed so much that this is a new phenomenon. I mean, I know nothing about infrastructure planning ofc; and a big part why I'm wondering is because I see in the news every year that there's larger blackouts across certain areas of the US.
I guess a portion of it is simply increased extreme weather events due to climate change.
@brauner @torvalds I can certainly say while trees falling down is obviously not new up here, it's CONSIDERABLY worse even just the last few years, so you may be spot on on the climate change effect.
It also comes down to the town actually doing the proper maintenance. Some cities actually trim trees around the lines, and they generally fare MUCH better in weather events
@brauner it’s much more expensive to do unless it’s a dense development. Basically overhead cables are cheap and “good enough” for almost all use.
I’ve lived in this house for 20 years now, and this is the second time ever we’ve really had anything like this. So being without power for a few days isn’t worth the worry.
From what I’ve seen (admittedly limited), underground power in the US is pretty much the norm whenever you have any kind of half-way dense development - whether it’s a developer building several houses together, or a town or a city. But feeder lines to the area tend to be aerial.
And part of the issue is then obviously that the US tends to be a lot less dense than Europe. At least in (southern) Finland, 100km is generally considered to be a reasonably long trip.
In the US, it might be a daily commute.
Of course, my bias is showing. I was a city boy when I lived in Finland. I considered places in downtown Helsinki that I couldn’t walk to to be outside the so-called “susiraja” (literally “wolf border”, city-boy speak for “wilderness”).
@brauner @cwayne @torvalds I don't think there's a pattern of this being anything new in the US. I've known power outages here due to weather events my whole life - where I grew up it was more due to tornadoes, but the occasional freezing rain outage was a thing.
Power lines are buried in downtown Portland. The scaling works better in an urban center.
I know Germany buries most of its utilities. How much of that is due to "clean slate" planning after the war?