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I’m trying to calm myself from a bit of catastrophizing.

As most of you probably know, my entire state is really fucking cold right now. What you may not have heard is that one of our regional suppliers of natural gas had a fire today. It destroyed one plant and took two others offline for 2-4 days. I’m assuming that the risk of them catching fire is sufficient that putting flammable gas through them is likely to lead to a bigger fire with more long term damage.

I got a loud emergency alert on my phone instructing is not to set our thermostat higher than 65F and to go down to 60F if possible. Part of my brain is now gibbering about how many people will could die.

Just writing it down is helping. I think I can sleep now.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

sasha_feather

whoa!

From:

fred_mouse

I don't know if I'm missing something here - if the thermostat is down to 60F, then that is what the house temp is? Or will it be colder than that? If it is that (which the internet tells me is 15C), what is the concern about people dying?

From:

the_rck

The concern about people dying is whether or not we have enough gas available today for all or some of us to lose heat entirely, either for an hour or two or for several days. It’s cold enough that an hour without heat might bring a building temperature very low. Our house was built in the post-WWII boom and has very thin outer walls. The walls are less than 2 inches (about 5cm) thick.

Right now they’re saying rolling power loss across the state.

From:

fred_mouse

Oh! I hadn't twigged to the losing gas entirely. Thank you for clarifying.

From:

lunabee34

Hugs

I hope you were able to calm down.

From:

the_rck

::hugs back:: I managed to sleep.

I'm still worried, but there's also very little I can do but hope.

From:

havocthecat

How cold is it up there? It is REALLY COLD here.

60-65 is doable if you are a normal person with normal health conditions, but. Electric blankets all the way?

From:

the_rck

We're being asked to minimize electrical usage. No use of major appliances beyond refrigerators, for example. No non-essential use of hot water that will make the heaters draw more power (we use gas for ours).

The weather app on my phone says it's -18F with a wind chill of -30F. The app tends to be off by a bit (plus or minus as much as 5 degrees), so that's not exact. At a certain point, I just figure it's cold enough that the exact numbers don't matter for most applications.

From:

lauand

Would it be possible for you to get an electric heater? They have helped me a lot when my heating acted up. If only as a temporary solution, I think it might be worth it.

From:

the_rck

We're also being asked to limit electricity use. The grids that adjoin ours are having problems due to the cold which means that we can't lean on them if things go wrong here and that they need help from us if we can give it.

The infrastructure is old and pretty much guaranteed to fail catastrophically eventually. It's just that upgrading or replacing it will cost billions without producing changes that most people will notice, so we're going to have to have that catastrophic failure before there's political will to put money into it.

We can't get sufficient money for road repairs, and people do notice when those don't work. They just mostly want magic money to appear to pay for them without taxes.

(Sorry. Infrastructure stuff makes me really angry because that's my last defense against collapsing into a black hole of anxiety.)

From:

lauand

Aarghh. I really hope everything gets fixed.

(Oh, I do hear you. Rant away. I'm not a big fan of paying taxes myself, but they are very necessary and I actually prefer to pay more taxes and to have the system give it back in the form of infrastructure investment and social security than letting things decay and people to fend for themselves. Again, I do hope your situation gets solved.)