A Halloween Tale

To tell this story properly, we have to back up 70 days, to late August, 2011, as Hurricane Irene barreled up the East Coast.

People who know me even a little bit know that while not a full-fledged survivalist, I like to think of myself as prudently prepared. What passes for "prudent" is the difference between my version of sanity and what other people might call "crazed." I went to somewhat extended lengths in anticipation of the fizzle known as Y2K (I still have a small amount of rotted-out firewood left over from a half-cord I bought in late 1999), and I actually bought sheets of heavy plastic to seal my house during the anthrax scare of  the winter of 2001. I read stories of near-miss asteroids with special care and one of my favorite genres of movies are apocalyptic disaster films (I've even reviewed a few in years past on the blog). I'll take "The Walking Dead" over anything on TV Sunday night.

For Irene, I was in total freak-out mode. Sometime around 2010 I had taken a recommendation from Engadget and bought on eBay for $20 a so-called "zombie apocalypse" cell phone. Two days before Irene hit I was researching solar-powered handcranked radios (with flashlight and cell charger) and ordered overnight Amazon Prime a little Eton radio recommended by the Red Cross. I called it my zombie apocalypse radio. I froze water in bags to keep my lower fridge cooled. I bought water, lots of flavored Zero water at BJ's. I downloaded hurricane apps to my iPhone and iPad.

I never lost power, other than a slight flicker, though 700,000 of my fellow Connecticutians were knocked out, some for 7 days.

So now fast forward to October 28. By Friday, I vaguely became aware that forecasters were predicting a freakish snowstorm for Saturday night October 29. Now I am from Minnesota. I know how to survive snowstorms. Hell, we had a whopper of a winter here in Connecticut in 2011, one that equaled the kind of thing I was familiar with from my childhood. But in general I don't take Northeast snowstorms too seriously, and am of the general impression that Connecticutians are wimps when it comes to snow.

I knew I should make some preparations. Friday night came, and I decided to put off preparations until Saturday morning. Saturday morning I went to the grocery store, bought a gallon of water, some cookies, and a few other trivial foodstuffs (stupid me -- most required refrigeration), went to a liquor store to pick up a 6-pack and a bottle of single malt, and then headed home. No bags of ice for the fridge. No hoarding of batteries; already had done that 70 days earlier. Nothing to worry about. At worst, I figured I might be snowbound for a day or two. Great! I was all set for Sunday NFL on RedZone (little did I know I would end up missing 2 weekends of football). At 2 pm I torrented a movie and burned it to a DVD as I saw the first giant wet snowflakes melt on the driveway. At exactly 3 pm I popped the DVD into my home theater system, sat down with a sandwich, got 3 minutes into the movie, and then everything went dark.

The rest is -- as they say -- history. A firetruck pulled onto our street -- one of our street's electric poles had been shorted out and the pole was literally burning. This was the first meeting of our neighborhood gawkers. We would meet to commiserate on the sidewalks of our street many times more in the days to come. We were ready for a night without power. And then the immensity of the regional disaster set in. What happened on our street happened a thousand times over throughout the Northeast. Little did I know I was at the epicenter of the mess, and that I would be amongst the last 4% of people in my state (and some tiny decimal point for the multi-state region) to get power and heat back.

There is no point recounting a day-by-day litany of what essentially is nothing to report. The snowfall was maybe a grand total of 3 inches in my area. It seemed like nothing. I was fortunate in that I had gas water heat and stovetop, so I could shower and cook (that is until all my food spoiled). Sunday, after the storm had completely passed, I actually drove on perfectly passable freeways to Brooklyn to celebrate my daughter's birthday. On my drive back that afternoon, listening to the Hartford radio station WTIC I realized I was returning to a disaster zone. Hearing of monstrous scenes around working gas stations, I tanked up about 30 miles outside of Hartford. It was a bit crazy, but the whole episode of waiting in line and gassing up took a grand total of 15 minutes. At my home exit, a working gas station caused such a backup of cars on the street leading off the exit that I had to weave my way from the exit through a parking lot in order to find my way home. I returned to a dark and cold house. The next day I smartly had barbecue chicken on my gas grill as I tried to save to good purpose one last thing from my failing freezer.

Hartford was relatively unscathed; driving up one block from my house I encountered fully functioning shopping plazas, diners, and gas stations. My workplace, Trinity College, was untouched. Classes went on normally. Every day I recharged my phone (and then my toothbrush, and then my razor) in the office. There was heat. My students were oblivious to the mess just beyond our ivory tower.  It was frustrating to spend half the day in a disaster movie, and then half the day as a normal person. My students naturally and simply did not get that I was beginning to unravel.

But there was something about the need to protect the homestead. This was my house. I needed to be there. I'd rush home each afternoon to try and get a few hours of sunlight to clean the house and prepare for the interminable night. As soon as I entered my town there were trees and wires hanging as sudden obstacles. It was a full-fledged disaster zone.

Monday night, night 3, was supposed to be Halloween, postponed by the city fathers to Saturday, November 5 (when it was then completely canceled). I started going to sleep at 8 pm and rising at the crack of dawn. Sleep was impossible - I have sleep apnea and cannot get a restful sleep without a Constant Positive Air Pressure (CPAP) machine. I was becoming the zombie I was so worried about.

I realized by day 4 that all the wonders of a zombie apocalypse cell phone were of not much use when the cell towers began losing their standby power. The cell serving my home area was becoming progressively less and less reliable. Returning home each night with a fully charged iPhone, I could use an on-and-off 3G network to keep track of outage reports for my town. I tried to cut back on calls, and tried to rely more and more on texting. In the office I was fine and dandy. But it was at home when I needed the comfort of being connected to someone, anyone. I learned during the daylight hours how to point my little solar-powered radio to the sun so as to get the best charge. And it was important to get home during the daylight hours, to try to take advantage of the daylight temperature highs in order to raise the temperature in the house for the cascade that would occur each night.

I tried the fireplace. It was a wasted effort, but it kept me busy. The wood was next to useless, so I burned some books I was planning to throw out or donate. All the heat seemed to go up the smokestack, and the smoke sometimes backed into the living room, giving the entire house a hickory smell. Then the flue would be open, letting in more cold. No good.

By mid-week my workplace had slowly come around to the fact that its workstaff was struggling. Meals were offered, warm spaces to sleep. I took advantage of the food, but decided I wasn't going to sleep in the vicinity of students. TMI.

I was a wreck. There is some psychological need to finish the day and then go home to relax. But there was no relaxing at home. An elaborate wall of home theater relaxation was dead. I love my gadgets, but without power and without WiFi, I was a goner. One day at the office I examined gas powered generators on Amazon, which UPS would have delivered overnight, but 1200 watts would power nothing more than some lamps for 7 hours a gallon. What would be the point? I had, after all, plenty of shabbes and yahrzeit candles.

It became clear that my region of Connecticut would be the last to be re-energized. On Thursday night, night 6, the first lights in my neighborhood winked on. But not on my street. My town actually posted a map on its website (no longer available) that indicated my street was working! It infuriated me no end that we might be completely passed over because of that erroneous map. I was waking up at 3 am and taking long drives through darkened neighborhoods throughout my town to see for myself the extent of the blackout. There was a murder a block and a half from my house, something that rarely occurs in my placid suburb. Two days later there was an armed robbery at the Whole Foods. It seemed as if the very fabric of normalcy was unraveling.  On night 6 I got sick, but had a very game house guest who cheered me up with company and some excellent pharmaceutical advice for battling a cold (in fact I am still sick). She was happy to play "disaster" with me for an evening, and it made all the difference in getting to the end of Week 1.

I tweeted like crazy. I actually lost followers who became bored to tears with my endless accounts of my region's travail. It was hard to find the proper hashtag to make sure I was getting my message out. I eventually settled on #CTblackout, but very few people went along for the ride. As anger towards the utility Connecticut Light and Power increased, I also locked on to #CLP and then found a community of fellow tweeps.

CL&P is led by a seasoned engineer turned manager. For the first few days the Governor and the CEO would hold twice daily joint press conferences; by the end they were so estranged that the Governor would leave the room before the CEO came to the podium. I dropped everything I was doing to tune into these press conferences. The engineer set midnight Sunday (night 9) as a deadline for his company to have 99% restoration statewide -- a laudable target set by an engineer for a system spinning out of control. I really depended on that calm scientific prediction. On Saturday afternoon -- day 8 -- a wire crew actually was on our street. Said my brother in Minneapolis: "Well, you can't be far away now."

The deadline came and went. On the day of the deadline, a supervisory truck and a tree crew actually came down our street, doing a few cuts. But there was no line crew. I was now completely despondent. I swore I would stay each night in my house, and declined offers to sleep elsewhere. I finally gave up Sunday night and slept at friends in a nearby town. But by Monday morning, with a revised 99% deadline set for midnight that night (and one that looked just as unlikely), I swore to myself I was not going to sit by passively. Using my iPhone, I read up about neighborhood electrical lines -- triple-phase AC, dual-phase AC, step-down transformers, ground, the whole shebang -- and then drove down my street looking for line breaks. I spotted two. I called CL&P, pushed enough buttons to send me over to a live voice (and I must admit, the 2 times I felt I absolutely must talk to a human being I was connected almost immediately), and asked a few questions. My mantra was: "I am not mad, I understand that this is a question of science and engineering, but why is my street still out?" The CL&P human voice told me my neighborhood's circuit number, and the exact number of accounts associated with the circuit. I drove down my street again, counting houses -- an exact match of accounts to homes. I finally had a useful data point to work with. Armed with this information, I drove all around my town (charging the phone simultaneously), looking for the now more prevalent out-of-state line crews and in particular for the parked white CL&P car which carried the supervisor. I found a helpful supervisor about a half-mile from my house and armed with my newfound knowledge of circuits numbers and line voltages, I struck up a conversation. He actually called into dispatch to try and find for me the crew tasked with our circuit.

Within a half hour of talking to this very decent midlevel field supervisor, a CL&P car came down our street and inspected our wires; then an hour later a tree cutting crew from South Carolina came to cut away branches for 4 hours; then while I was at a late afternoon lecture on campus an unknown line crew came through. I’ll never know if my running around was actually helpful, but I was so frustrated with that missed Sunday night deadline that I simply was not going to sit in my cold house and wait for things to take care of themselves. At the same time all the running around and obsessive dedication did me in. I returned from campus at 5:45 completely exhausted. As I turned up my street I saw lights all down the block. The streetlights were at a low buzz (like when a CFL bulb first comes on), meaning I must have missed the re-energization by a matter of a minute. Inside the house, I could hear the oil-fed furnace had kicked on. Only when I saw the house temperature rise above 57 degrees (an 8-day record high) did I then venture to the grocery store in a fog of confusion; I then slept and woke up sicker than the day before. But at least the 36 customers of circuit 47N8 (my street as known to the engineers of CL&P) got their power back. In my mind, I’m an unsung hero.

Not for a second do I forget that there are still thousands of customers even now without power. As I finish this post, there are still 13,000 customers statewide without power, 1300 in my town. Today the high temperature was 70 degrees, so I hope it wasn't an awful day for them. 

It was a Halloween Tale  I and many hundreds of thousands will never forget.

First, but not last, post concerning the Halloween Blackout

I sent this to a friend in Israel:

After 218 hours – that is 9+ days – power was finally restored to circuit 47N8 and its 36 customers (that is how the utility thinks of my street). Working on my street over the last 3 days were crews from Kansas, Georgia, Kentucky, and South Carolina. It was amazing. There are still 40,000 customers without power, down from 830,000, meaning I was in the final 4%.

I actually slept somewhere else last night for my first sleep with the CPAP machine in 8 nights. I am now doing laundry, and am headed to the grocery store to get the basics, at 8:45 pm. My classes are in ruin, I am exhausted, and I have a cold.

Let's Make A Deal

The prisoner swap scheduled to take place next week -- over 1,000 Israeli-held prisoners for one kidnapped Israeli soldier -- has generated a great deal of speculation and analysis. There are so many potential dots associated with this surprising bargain that need to be connected -- so many players, so many "under the table" components -- that virtually anybody with even a half-baked "insight" has felt compelled to rush forward with a "thoughtful" interpretation of what looks on the surface to be a hard-to-swallow transaction. The more dots, the grander the interpretation and more fanciful the account of the Gilad Shalit deal, bordering on full-blown conspiracy theories. The consumer of analytical pieces on the Arab-Israeli conflict oftentimes feels that he who connects the most dots wins: whoever manages, by dint of knowing obscure facts and being privy to the "inside baseball" machinations of all the players, to create a grand unifying theory that ties together every loose end has probably got the story right.

In this case, however, the less dots connected, the closer one comes to what I believe is the true story.

The most grandiose "connect all the dots" interpretations have come from not a few Israeli journalists, usually of leftist sympathies, and also from the Iranian media, who have speculated that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is "clearing the decks" of all old business, thereby strengthening his domestic stature, in anticipation of launching a military strike against Iranian nuclear sites. In this version of things "as they really are," even this week's US announcement of the uncovering of a sinister Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador on American soil is part of the groundwork in anticipation of a coordinated attack on Iran.

If, however, we step back from these preposterous conspiracy tales and concentrate on the principal players in the deal, we might draw a different conclusion.

Who then are the players? First, we have HAMAS in Gaza and to a lesser degree in Damascus. Second, we have the Israeli coalition government of PM Netanyahu in Jerusalem. Third, we have the Egyptian military junta (the "Supreme Council of the Armed Forces"; or SCAF) in Cairo. Finally, we have the exchangees and their surrogates: on the Israeli side we have Gilad Shalit's family and friends; and on the Palestinian side we have hundreds of detainees, some convicted of murder, some detained for less weighty security reasons. Seen from this more direct perspective, we don't have so many dots to connect.

Instead, what we have is a deal that makes sense for everyone involved. As with all plausibly successful transactions in the Arab-Israeli conflict, everyone can walk away claiming victory, and everyone also loses.

First, let's look at HAMAS. HAMAS hasn't had much going for it in recent months. Inside Gaza, HAMAS was reportedly losing its popularity, unable to convincingly move the needle in any positive way for the residents of the Strip. A unification deal with the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority unraveled, and the PA campaign at the UN left HAMAS without a viable strategy. The component of HAMAS based in Damascus was also facing the prospect of diminished influence as Syria descended into near-civil war. So it made sense for HAMAS to slightly alter its negotiating stand in the Shalit package in order to sweeten the deal for Israel, and thereby gain back a bit of stature.

On to the Israelis: PM Netanyahu has just passed through a very difficult summer domestically and internationally. The unprecedented "social justice" campaign and the continued uncertainty created by the Arab Spring caused the typically reluctant Netanyahu to take a decision on a matter of national consensus, to bring a hapless soldier home from captivity. With the military and intelligence communities prepared to sign off on a slightly sweetened package, Netanyahu likely saw a window of opportunity suddenly open and soon close, and took the deal.

Interlocutor Egypt has faced growing domestic and international opprobrium, the latter directly related to SCAF's sclerotic response to last month's momentary crisis with the Israeli embassy fiasco. SCAF's standing hardly improved in the wake of the Maspero pogrom this month. Here was a chance to rehabilitate the international respectability of SCAF.

A sidebar to this story is the heroic status of the Shalit family in Israeli reckoning. It is not easy for outsiders to understand the special status that families of hostages hold in Israeli society. Some observers of Israel stand in awe of the special regard such families tend to receive; on the other hand, Israeli leaders can be drawn into entertaining ridiculously lopsided arrangements because of the cultural status accorded such families by the media and political elites. Even so, the Shalits have been relatively ineffective in hastening their son's homecoming.

The Palestinian detainees, particularly the hardcore HAMAS vanguard, have practiced the art of sumud ("steadfastness") to perfection. A few of the soon-to-be released detainees have been under Israeli detention for over 30 years, and those that are not being released have reportedly accepted their fate for the sake of their brothers and sisters. Israel clearly crossed through some of its so-called "red lines" -- but not all. It is not the first bitter pill to be swallowed by the Israelis in such deals, but in the end it looks like it was HAMAS that blinked most recently, allowing for the deal to be made.

The outlines for this deal have been on the table for over 3 years. With every delay, the terms of the deal tightened. All 3 players stumbled into an international environment which begged for closure to this one tiny irritant against a complex weave of problems which cannot be resolved. The deal was always out there to be made. Reluctantly, they all stumbled into the chance to each improve their own standing, if only for a news cycle. Nothing more.

Turkey & Israel: A Friendly Match?

Here is an interesting tidbit, despite all the brouhaha: Thursday the Israeli soccer team Maccabi Tel Aviv is playing a match against the Turkish team Beşiktaş in the Europa League, in Istanbul. Very few Israeli fans have made the trip to support their team. Normally, thousands would have made the trip; media reports have the number this time at less than 200. Extra security has been deployed in Istanbul. Here is a pregame report from Turkey's largest English-language paper, Hürriyet Daily News. Here is how the pregame is being covered in one of Israel's leading papers, Haaretz.

Start-up Nation Becomes Fed-Up Nation

It all started in June over cottage cheese.
The 3 large dairy concerns in Israel (Tnuva, Strauss & Tara) simultaneously raised the price of cottage cheese (for the 3rd time in less than 24 months) in June of 2011, and a disgruntled consumer started a Facebook page to protest the price hike. 90,000 people signed in to the page, a hue and cry went forth in the land, and the dairy monopolies rolled back the price increase. There was some online chatter that the cottage cheese revolt marked the arrival of the popular uprising movement of the region (the so-called "Arab Spring") to Israel. It was far from a "people's revolt" however, and despite the efforts of leftists, anarchists, and fringe political activists, no one seriously took the cottage cheese revolt to be on par with the "Arab Spring." But Israelis seemed restless, as if they didn't want to be left on the outside as the region roiled.
There used to be in Israel an array of mechanisms, largely of a socialist hue, which counteracted against economic and social inequities as Israelis naturally acquired wealth and emerged into some prosperity. In the old pioneering days there was a powerful national labor confederation, aligned with the ruling power, which put pressure on the leadership to have national funds allocated to the workers and their social welfare. An array of government subsidies and socialized services helped turn a nation of impoverished immigrants into a healthy and robust society, all against the background of a defense posture which drained the economy. But times have changed, the Histadrut is a shadow of its former self, the Army has a manpower problem in that it has more recruits than it needs, a wave of privatization has transformed the once-pervasive Israeli state system into a market-driven capitalist "start-up nation." Both Israelis and American Jews boasted of the robust, unstoppable IT service-based economy which brought untold blessings to a nation that a scant 30-years earlier was a philanthropic basket-case.

#J14, 4 days in - the entire site

Which brings us to July 14. A few days after the cottage cheese revolt, a university student pitched a tent on one of the iconic boulevards of downtown Tel Aviv to protest the lack of affordable rentals in metropolitan Tel Aviv for university students. University undergrads in Israel are 20-21 years old and have finished a mandatory 12-24 month stint in the Israeli Army.
The fuse was slow to burn: at first a small number of protesters and malcontents set up shop in sympathy with this sudden appearance of citizen activism. Using the Twitter hashtag #j14 (akin to #j25 - still used on Twitter by Egyptians to refer to the first great protest at Tahrir Square on January 25, 2011 and all that has come thereafter), the protest seemed to me to be nothing more than a tiny group of anarchists and professional malcontents when I visited the site on July 18. I counted 43 tents which filled a single block. I tweeted that day:

The #TelAviv renters' protest is a joke -virtually no one there - mostly anarchists trying to catch a ride. Media exaggerates

Boy did I get that wrong.
Within 2 weeks, #j14 had become a mass protest, and the tent city extended the entire length of the Boulevard, nearly a mile. On July 30, an estimated 150,000 Israelis marched in the largest cities of the country to join together in a corporate complaint against not just rentals, but the seeming collapse of the social contract between Israeli politicians and the citizens of Israel. There have been larger protests in modern Israel's history, but never for a matter of domestic-only concern.
There has been some pushback from the Israeli oligarchs. One government minister dismissed the protesters as enjoying a tent city of "nargilas and sushi," suggesting the protesters are spoiled middle-class kids on a summer lark. Caroline Glick, true to form, dismissed the frenzied media attention lavished on the protest movement (Channel 2 uses the logo "a nation in protest").
As long as the protest remained focus on the purely domestic issue of "social justice" - prices, wages, and rent - the protest could be embraced by Israelis across political, religious, and ethnic divides. But everyone sees a variation of their own grievance in the amorphous call for "social justice." As soon as the leftists stress the onerous cost of the settlement movement (as two writers from the leftist 972mag.com tendentiously argued in today's New York Times) , or Israeli-Arabs make their own special claim for justice (see hashtag #tent48), or ultra-Orthodox, or Kahanists, or labor federation officials stake out their share of the justice pie, the protest is bound to be victim of the old Eastern European Jewish adage: "put 2 Jews in a room, and you'll have 3 opinions." Most protesters are comfortable blaming the misappropriation of their tax dollars to governmental corruption and preferential treatment for the rich; the next step - seeing the untenable occupation as the second source of economic woes - might be a bridge too far for some neophyte protesters.
Israelis are fed up, but unless the next week and the week thereafter produce ever larger and consistently peaceful turnouts, the summer will end, classes will resume, and the dysfunction that is the Israeli economy and government will continue on. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and his government won't fall, the Israeli parliament will sputter and fulminate over populist distractions, the settlement project will continue to suckle at the nation's teat, the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. Same as it ever was.
USA readers - sounds familiar, no?