I left for the office early Thursday morning. The sky was gray with the dawn’s early light, but a strange darkness filled the street as I wound my way out of Windy Bush, the development where we live, onto Maple Avenue. Our power had gone out during Wednesday evening’s storms and, despite PECO’s assurances to the contrary, it was still out ten hours later.

But it wasn’t out everywhere. In fact, it seemed as if it was out nowhere but our little development.  141 customers, the PECO outage alert told us.

A bright and brilliant green light welcomed me to Maple Avenue.  An “open” sign blinked happily in the window of Dunkin Donuts.  The cheery glow of streetlights cut the gray darkness of the morning as I drove down Maple Avenue toward the borough. Porch lights were on at some houses and light shined through the windows of early risers getting ready for work or school.  The rest of the world was oblivious to the dark pall draped over the lives of 141 of us still in the bleak darkness of our power outage. Continue reading →