Product Description
In January 1998 a massive ice storm descended on New York, New England, and eastern Canada. It crushed power grids from the Great Lakes to the North Atlantic, forcing thousands of people into public shelters and leaving millions of others in their homes without electricity. In this riveting book Stephen Doheny-Farina presents an insider’s account of these events, describing the destruction of the electric network in his own village and the emergence of the face-to-face interactions that took its place. His stories examine the impact of electronic communications on community, illuminating the relationship between electronic and human connections and between networks and neighborhoods, and explori… More >>
The Grid and the Village: Losing Electricity, Finding Community, Surviving Disaster
The Grid and the Village: Losing Electricity, Finding Community, Surviving Disaster
3 Comments
Tags: Community, Disaster, electricity, Finding, Grid, Losing, Surviving, VillagePosted 14 Jun 2010 in General
Here is what I emailed to the author:
“Just finished reading it. Thank you, excellent book.
On the next printing, please remove the attack on consumerism in the guise of a once in a 250 year storm as justification. A little absurd.
Also: how about a section on why the towers for the power transmission cables failed. Why the engineering specs were not more robust.
And, a section on what happened to house hold plumbing with arctic temperatures and no heat.
Thank you.”
I didn’t receive a response. Rating: 3 / 5
Kind of odd. The story of a storm in New England and how it affected people who were without power. Accounts of the storm are interspersed with hsitorical-fiction vignettes about how the areas was settled. The different parts of the story were not woven together well enough. Rating: 3 / 5
For the most part, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I heard Mr. Farina being interviewed recently on public radio and the subject of his book sounded interesting. Although I do not normally like a mix of fictional but fact-based historical narrative with a personal (I was there) account of events, it moves this story along. Mr. Farina does an excellent job of making you think about all those electronic luxuries that we take for granted. Where the power comes from. How is it transmitted. What this place was like before electricity. Who was here before electricity. And so on. Having experienced a natural disaster when Hurricane Hugo struck South Carolina in 1989 and being without electricity for 10 days, I can appreciate much of what Mr. Farina, his family, neighbors and residents of Potsdam, NY experienced during the ice storm of 1998. Fortunately, brutal cold was not a factor for me. I found myself looking for a map to ponder the St. Lawrence River area, especially where Louisville Landing once existed. The chapters move along, although I found the last chapter a little bit too academic in its post-ice storm analysis but Mr. Farina is a professor. Rating: 4 / 5