Comment by _heimdall
I live in a somewhat rural area and we got bit hard by this last winter.
Our road used to have a handful of houses on it but now has around 85 (a mix of smaller lots around an acre and larger farming parcels). Power infrastructure to our street hasn't been updated recently and it just barely keeps up.
We had a few days that didn't get above freezing (very unusual here). Power was out for about 6 hours after a limb fell on a line. The power company was actually pretty quick to fix it, but the power went out 3 more times in pretty quick succession.
Apparently a breaker kept blowing as every house regained power and all the various compressors surged on. The solution at the time was for them to jam in a larger breaker. I hope they came back pretty quickly to undo that "fix" but we still haven't had any infrastructure updates to increase capacity.
"The solution at the time was for them to jam in a larger breaker"
I've seen some cowboy sh!t in my time but jeez, that's rough.