Electric Utility Outage Maps - Hurricane Irene Edition

I love utility maps.  You have been warned. 

A few days after Hurricane Irene took a swing at the east coast I looked at the outage maps for some of the electric utilities there.  I had heard reports of widespread power outages from news channels back east, but I'd also heard from friends that Irene just wasn't as bad as they had expected (they were in PA, which you'll see in a moment wasn't hit as hard as other areas).  These following outage maps show the huge impact the storm had on electric utilities.  The screenshots were taken on August 30th; about 2 days after Irene hit MD, NJ, PA, NY, etc.

Here's Hurricane Irene's path:

Ok!  Let's start in the southern part of the Northeast...


Delmarva Power (DELaware MARyland VirginiA, for those unfamiliar) had just under 2500 customers without power, as of 2 days after the storm. 

Atlantic City Electric, which covers a large portion of southern New Jersey, had over 4000 customers without power.

PSE&G had 40,000+ customers without power
(note: estimated using low end of the key scale).

Jersey Central Power & Light had over 60,000+ customers without power
(note: estimated using low end of the key scale).

Specifically, Monmouth County alone had over 57,000 people without power.

Let's head inland to check out the situation in Pennsylvania.
Met-Ed and PPL both look pretty decent, at least compared to NJ.

Highlighting the hardest hit part of PPL's territory

ConEdison had 33,000+ customers without power.

Here is a roll-over breakdown of where the most affected customers live:

Long Island Power Authority was hit pretty hard as well.

Connecticut Light & Power... This map really shows how hard CT was hit by the storm.  There were a few areas that had 100% of customers without power. 

National Grid

Central Maine Power's website is a bit different. Rather than having an interactive, fairly real-time map of outages, they had a series of images showing outages from 8/28 through 8/30 (when I downloaded information).  I strung their images together in an animation so you can see the change over time, and when the most people were without power.  I apologize for the jumpiness of the image... their maps were all different, and for a quick blog entry I wasn't about to spend hours adjusting each image.  Sorry!

You may need to click through to see the animated image.

If you're still with me, I hope you enjoyed the outage maps!  It was fun to see not only the heavily impacted areas, but also to check out the different types of outage maps electric utilities use on their websites.

State High Point - Delaware!

Delaware
Ebright Azimuth
On the way home from a biking trip in Delaware (White Clay Creek State Park!), Jimmy and I decided to take the long way home again... past DE's highest point!  The highest point marker is at the intersection of Ebright Rd & Ramblewood Dr, north of Wilmington, DE.  As it turns out, the land in the trailer park west of that intersection is actually a few feet higher.  However, that is rumored to be due to construction, and is therefore not the natural high point.  Anyway, we visited at night, so here are the best photos I could get.  Also note, it was trick-or-treat night, so there were lots of kids walking around in scary costumes!

 Ebright Azimuth - DE's High Point Marker

The park in the trailer park behind the High Point Marker.

Some of the land in the trailer park is higher than the natural highpoint.

I've noticed another curious thing about DE's highpoint.  The marker has been moved! 

Take a look at the Google StreetView:

View Larger Map
In StreetView the marker is located on the SE corner of Ebright & Ramblewood (across from the radio tower in the view).  However, the marker is now located on the west side of Ebright at the intersection with Ramblewood, and there's a nice sort of outcropping in the sidewalk so you can check it out without getting hit by cars!  Awesome!  We couldn't find the actual benchmark, but perhaps it's located near where the marker used to be?  We'll have to go back in the day time to look around for it.

Twelve-Mile Circle
On a separate trip to the White Clay Creek State Park area, we visited the end point of the Twelve-Mile Circle, which is the arc of the Delaware/Pennsylvania border.  Wikipedia has a nice illustration:

The Twelve-Mile Circle.  Not the blog.

I fell in a bunch of mud, but it was a worthwhile visit nonetheless!  And here are my photos:



I apologize for seemingly visiting Delaware only at night, and for the resulting poor photos!