Power to the People

Power has been somewhat elusive around St. Louis since the storm yesterday morning. I lost power from eight in the morning until after three yesterday afternoon, and overall, I seem to be fortunate. At that point 8,500 homes were without power in St. Charles alone. Some estimates I heard put the metro area total at something closer to 90,000 still without power as of this morning.

Traffic has been a mess because of all this. Many traffic signals are still out or are flashing red because of the outages. Long traffic jams were the norm today. And while waiting in traffic, the most common sight seemed to be tons of trees split right down the middle as if a giant axe had split them apart. I saw one tree, apparently uprooted, that looked like it had probably been there for at least 100 years.

Walgreens employees at one area location today could all be seen congregating at the doorway of the closed store since apparently they hadn't been sent home but no business was possible in the store. One of the fireworks vendors, Red Rocket Fireworks (d.b.a. Crazy Dave's Fireworks), apparently lost three of its ten area tents to the storms — destroying all of the remaining inventory at those tents. Today was the day they were suppose to pack up, so the storm came just a bit too soon to avert the loss of the fireworks.

Quite a storm.