COMMENTARY | When Winter Storm Alfred slowly made its way up the East Coast, weather forecasts gradually got worse from the initial 4- to 6-inch estimate. With weather in the 50s today in the Danbury, Conn., a lot of the snow we got has been melting away. With the possibility of the snow being gone within the next couple of days, the mayhem and destruction the storm caused on the region will remain long after the melting process is complete.
While the snow was still coming down outside the window to my apartment, I began to feel as though we lucked out. The weather forecast said that the biggest issue (aside from snow in October), was going to be the heavy winds that would then knock the trees, filled with wet leaves, down. Not soon after the feeling of luck, my sand-filled hourglass ran out.
At 8:55 p.m. on October 29, the power went out, something that I would have to deal with for close to 40 hours until I arrived home during the afternoon of Halloween to full electricity. While it’s great to have power, the problems that the storm brought still remain. Countless trees were uprooted, branches fell on houses and cars, and residents of the state were forced to sleep through a night with record-low temperatures.
I may have gotten my power back this afternoon, but most of my family will be without power for up to a week, which seems like a repeat of the situation we saw in August with Hurricane Irene. The outage has prompted me to invite those family members over as we cook the food we would have wasted had the power remained out.
Now that my tally is off the affected total list, as of 9:15 a.m., Connecticut Light & Power, the largest utility in the state was reporting that 54 percent of customers were still being affected by widespread power outages. The outages prompted countless school closures, accidents, and panic. While the biggest problem now will be getting people back to full power, one scary thing about human nature still remains.
The old adage that said that you find out the true colors of people when things go bad was something that was true with my local area. With traffic lights out around the city, a lot of local drivers seemed to forget about their fellow man. While some local cities (Bethel and Newtown) placed temporary stop signs at these broken lights to remind drivers of the rules of the road, Danbury authorities were nowhere to be found, and problems were seen around the city. Oftentimes, those drivers looking to go straight at the lights flew straight through intersections, as though they were the only people on the road. It really says something about the lack of courtesy and respect seen on the roads today.
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