Lineman, you are correct. Mother nature is unpredictable, so people need to be prepared for power outages, like having generators to run fans and refrigerators and an alternate means of cooking. We learned a huge lesson in NC after Hurricane Fran hit in 1996. We are prepared for extensive power outages at my house.

Trouble is people live in a "NOW" era. They want it all NOW! Forget about humanity and how much work it takes to repair the damage done.

Lineman....I agree with you 100% my boyfriend is a controller for Consumers Energy in Michigan...he is called in for ungodly hours all year long and they bust their a$$es to get things on as fast as they can for folks...they do not drag their feet...Good job to you and your crew ...thanks for all you do!

If we buried power lines, trees would not knock them down. It costs more, but when you add up putting them back up, it is probably a bargain.

I thank you, Lineman. It's too bad that most of us Americans are self-centered, expletive, expletive, expletive, expletive, expletive, fools. Just about everywhere I go, I see how ignorantly people treat employees of businesses. They want people fawning all over them and demand perfection, served to them on a silver platter, at aluminum prices.

Having gone through this same experience with Hurricane Ike I want to say a big THANK YOU to you and all the other linemen who come from all over to help in these situations. Unfortunately, most Americans are too selfish to think about anyone but themselves.

Dear Lineman THANKYOU!!!

I live in a Chicago suburb and have not had power due to the storm that hit Sunday @ noon. I have not had power since then. I see how hard the Com Ed (and hundreds of other crews that came in to assist) and appreciate the extremely hard work they are putting in to get power restored! The trees needed to be removed off the lines first.. then the surveying (which is being done) and then the repairs. THANK YOU for helping us in the extreme conditions you all work in so we can be comfortable once again.

Thank you for your hard work in the lousiest of conditions. I have a cousin with a similar job, so I know the long, crazy hours he puts in.

SJC: I'm not an expert on anything technical. However, our digital cable is buried underground, and it goes out ALL the time! I'm sure things like earthquakes, critters, wildfires, etc. would interfere with underground lines as well.

Good on ya son for doing the good work. My prayers go out to you, your brothers, and your sisters out there in this heat. Thank you for the hard work you guys are doing.

SJC you got a point. In some places yes you could put the power underground. Depending on soil conditions, water levels, and what not. It would seriously take a lot of planning. The only thing you would have to worry about is all the other stuff running under there. The lines cant be within a certain distance of things like gas oil and so on. It gives off static charges. Of course, most if not all, telephone lines are buried now. Where as they do not carry the same current on the actual electricity ones do. They still have a charge as well.

Lineman thanks for all of your hard work. You have pointed out the problem though. Power Corps. no longer have crews at all locations, like they used to, due to cost savings. One of the reasons it takes so long to get the power back on is that the crews have to come from all over the country. When we have a wide spread storm like we just had there are just not enough people to fix them quickly. Today when our power gos out life stops. Our lives are run on the internet and I am not talking about FB or youtube. My banking my Dr. app. my Rx refills are all on line and with out power there is no cellphone connection. I don't even have a check book or a land line any more. Lets not even talk about all the disabled people in my complex, they have severe mobility problems and when the elevator is down they are trapped on all floors except the ground floor.

Raleighdolly -

I was without power for 17 days when Fran blew through (lived out off 1010 highway). I keep 5 gallons of water, non-perishable food, propane stove handy now year round.

The electric crews were great! I flagged down a truck that was from Georgia on day three. They picked up the live 220 line that was in my driveway and coiled it up on the service pole, asked if I needed anything else.

Yea, everyone thinks they should be the first to be taken care of. It makes me sick how people cuss the utility services because they are without power, If they all had to go out and repair their own lines, they would not complain anymore. these people working on your utility lines are very hard working people and they are doing their best. some of them work 16 hour shifts, while you sit around doing nothing. So, you can't watch tv or get on the internet, get over it. God forbid you have to send your kids outside to play. And how many of you ever had to do any manual labor in your lives, probably 50% of you if even that.

Global Warming is a myth. So is beef jerky.

Uncle Henry

What's your problem? Did the local utility turn down your job application so you need to stay on the public dole?

LOL...Uncle Yank, er...Hank is pissed because he has to wait his turn to use the electrical outlets available at the Westfield Mall.

Hang tough Lineman, most of us appreciate your hard work.

Utility cables should have been put underground decades ago....But as usual, the dividends to their stock holders means more than modernization....The morons still haven't figured how much more this is costing them in the long run.

Welcome to American capitalism.

rag_sr.

You probably never even had to do any work outside of your air conditioned office doing a woman's job because you can't hack manual labor.

A woman's job? There are more than a few brave female firefighters in Colorado who could probably kick your ass right this minute, rag, even after working on the fire lines for 30 hours.

Uncle Henry...........a few things. If you were as "educated" as you would like us all to beleive, you would know that we go through 4-5 years of a trade school. Which is fully accredited by the National Board of labor. Along with your amazingly high level of education, it sounds like you want us all to beleive you have HUGE ba**s too! Walk outside with those big ones and tell the next crew that drives by your house what you told me...........thought so, chicken sh!t. Ever thought, maybe they are not turning my lights on because I am a douchebag!

Yeah Uncle Henry you're a real character. It takes a lot of education in order to work with high tension power lines. If it didn't there would be dead linemen all over the country. If you're such an educated expert, drag your lazy ass out and go fix the lines. You seem to be egotistical enough to think you can do a better job. Go on, get your butt out of the confines of your air conditioning and go hang from a bucket 30 feet in the air in 100 plus temperatures.

Here's a grand idea! Learn to use a chainsaw and lend a hand. Novel idea, huh? We had tornados last year in my home town and I wasn't the one in the neighborhood complaining my lights were out, I helped my neighbors!

furthermore........hank, the angry drunken dwarf...........you're right we don't get drafted, we VOLLUNTEER to come out there and help your sorry azz! And we do it for the old folks, and the children, and the disabled, and the single moms, and the sick, and for the 1 out of ten decent people we see out there that stop us and say thanks. Thats all man.......nothing more, and nothing less.......we enjoy helping people when we can. You should try it sometime.......kinda makes you feel good.

Uncle Henry came on a bit too strong. However, I am tired of people trying to glorify every single job on the planet as being "heroes" work. It's their job to fix the lines, the same way it's a plumbers job to fix the pipes. These are good honest decent paying jobs that 85% of the world's population would beg and kill for. Complaining about the heat or the long hours of the job does not make me respect you as much as if you just did your job to the best of your ability and then went home to your family and stopped looking for "attaboys". I spent 2 years out of the past 8 in Iraq and I can promise you that it was just as hot and definitely longer hours and a thousand times more dangerous. The difference was at the end of the day I didn't get to go home to my family. Your job is not that bad. Appreciate it and stop trying to glorify it. It's hard and sucks some times but so do most jobs, just in different ways.

People really need to be careful where they plant trees. I see far too many trees planted right under power lines. What were those people thinking? That 6 foot tall maple you plant today will be 85 foot tall someday. Utility companies in many cases cannot remove trees that danger the lines only trim them by law. Most of the time that really doesn't solve the problem. Read the tag at the nursery. All tree have them. If no tag ask. Burying lines is not a cure all but would go aong way towards helping. In my town most lines are burried but my power goes out 12 or more times a year for at least 1 hour.

I waited 3 days for my power to turn back after the storm hit us in Northern Virginia late Friday night, but made the best of it without complaining. While Dominion Power moved their resources to critical installations (i.e. hospitals, police departments, etc) we were professionally serviced by PIKE, a company based in NC who worked non-stop to rebuild our power lines.

Thank you Lineman33 and all those out there who put their lives at risk to restore our power despite the heat and humidity!

Theres a problem with the "buck up and deal with it mentality" coming from Lineman. This society is now wholely reliant upon electricity. Removing it from our lives is like taking away water. Think about it. We dont grow our food in our backyards, it stays in the fridge. We dont cook over fires, we use ovens/microwaves. We dont have houses designed like in the 1800's with high roofs and are positioned according to the sun, we have the opposite. Most of our jobs are digital, Im an accountant and we're nearly "paper free." We pay most of our bills online. We're used to the internet for entertainment and communication, case and point were on here. So when the power goes out during a heat wave for more than a week, its quite the culture shock on those of us who have grown up knowing only life with electricity. Something to consider before you tell us how lucky we are to have linemen.

Lineman - I agree with everything you posted and thank you for working so hard to recover power as quickly as possible to those of us without it. Storms came through my area of Michigan before daybreak this morning and knocked out power to quite a few of us. It was 8 hours before my power was restored, but it was a small price to pay to finally get some rain. BTW, underground utilities will not solve the problem unless the entire system is underground. Power lines, telephone service and cable are underground in my neighborhood, but that does us absolutely no good when a tree falls on lines somewhere up the line that bring power to my neighborhood.

What do the idiots who are complaining about lack of power think that we used to do before most homes were air conditioned? There was a woman on the national news a couple of night ago who was complaining about the temperature on her second floor reaching 89 degrees. Really? 89 degrees? Is that truly a hardship? Give it a break and be thankful that your home wasn't destroyed.

You're right Travis, thank you, and God Bless You for your service!! But if you read the thread, nobody was ever looking for accolades.........I was just saying that hearing the negativity, and criticism all the time sucks. Keep your comments to yourself and let us do our job.

ABC homes before A/C were constructed in a manner that allowed them to stay cool in the heat of the day. Do some research before calling people idiots. New home designs turn the house into an oven if there is no power.

southern boy.........its not a "buck up and deal with it mentality". It's a " Im here to restore the power, so why does that make you think you can use me as a punching bag " mentality. We are trying to do our jobs, and help in the process. I never said you have to like the situation, just dont cuss, and threaten me while I'm working. I promise you......those kinds of actions will guarantee that yours are the last lights that come back on.

People who are frustrated are going to take it out on the front liners, i.e. you. Just like when you're pissed off at your health insurance premium hike and call Big Insurance and yell at the first person that answers. My brother works for an insurance company, he gets yelled at for a living due to the decisions of those much higher up the line than him. Get the picture?

rag. sr. "A woman's job?!?" What freaking era do you come from? Work is work. There are women who are linemen. And I've had to hump a rucksack in all the same weather as male soldiers during my time. Male or female, it doesn't matter what your gender. You do the work you need to do and the work you can get. My neice is a plasterer and I have a nephew who is a nurse. You might want to joing the 21st century.

I do, but you don't see that all over the national newspapers. Saying how its should be done faster and better and everything else do you!?

and so just because "that's the way it is" it makes it ok. Isn't that mentality a big part of the reason our society is in the shape it's in today?

Lineman, people do have a right to be upset - the fault isn't yours, but it is certainly your employer's. I am sorry you get it both ways; you get over-worked, and then you get it from people who are upset. And of course, morons telling you to buck up and be grateful doesn't help either.

In general, the problem is that we have a crumbling infrastructure, and it is going to get increasingly difficult to keep patching it. In addition, we are also going to get even more extreme weather conditions as global warming continues to get worse.

Lineman thanks for all of your hard work. You have pointed out the problem though. Power Corps. no longer have crews at all locations, like they used to, due to cost savings.Li

Lineman - imagine if we lived in a world that wasnt ran by profits, but rather, by necessity?

you wouldnt have to work 16 hrs a day, because there'd be 3x as many people doing what you do...

of course, you'd get paid less...and you couldnt bellyache about "doing your best"...and no one would be cussing you out because you'd be able to get everyone up and running in a day.

but, thats not the world we live in...your boss has shareholders to care about, so the customers and the workers get shortchanged.

gotta love capitalism, right?

money isnt real, it's a tool...and we are all being used.

@thatguydownsouth

ABC homes before A/C were constructed in a manner that allowed them to stay cool in the heat of the day. New home designs turn the house into an oven if there is no power.

That's the truth. I remember the old houses fondly. My aunt lived on a farm, and the house was very high and surrounded by large shade trees. All summer long, we just opened all the windows and were treated to a cool fresh breeze. Didn't have AC, didn't need AC, didn't want AC. On particularly hot days, we used a window fan pointing out to circulate the air. It felt so much better than AC.

But modern houses are built in the open, with no shade trees, and have 20 inches of insulation blown into the spaces. They cannot "breathe". That's why it's so bad when the electricity goes out.

They are always talking about how the Power grid is going to fail. On the east coast and in the Mideast. Maybe just maybe if we all complained to CONGRESS. They could get an infrastructure bill signed. So we could get out of the industrial age GRID. And into a system that is more modern. And create some more work. For the out of work Americans out East and in the Midwest.

Oh wait the Republicans think Corporate America gives a Rats A$$. They wont sign it. Guess GAS run generators are going to get sold for even more now. Better buy some Coleman stock or Honda.

Linemen, and others in the infrastructure community, really are the unsung heroes in our midst.

They do a very dangerous job, in terrible conditions, for hours if not days on end, and every deadline is yesterday.

No one thanks them for the millions of times that you flip a switch and power is there, but everyone seems content to throw them under the bus for not being stronger, smarter, and faster than the worst that Mother Nature has to offer.

If you can't live without electricity for a few days, then you need to get your @!$%# together. Period. People did it for millions of years- you can do it for a week.

And if you see a utility truck near your house, don't ask them "When?", just offer them a cold drink and a "Thank you".

It's summer-time ferchristsake, you've already got 14 hours of natural lighting, how much more do you really need?

Privatization of our utilities were a big mistake.....corporations put off rebuilding and updating the grid system. People in this country sit back and don't complain when private industry screws things up. We were much better when our utilities were under government control.

We got sold a bill of goods when utilities went private...Oh we heard the age old mantra "costs will go down" well they did for 6 months and then they skyrocketed....Goes to show you in many cases gov't can do a better job!

Oh puh leeze. If govt does it better then why are all the local municipalities buckling under their own pension plans?

flag waver

I don't know where you live, but as long as I've been alive utilities have been private enterprises. Granted, there are some places where there are still "municipal" utility companies, but they are very few and far between. And where those utilities have been sold to private companies, it was done as the "municipalities" could no longer afford the maintenance and expansion necessary.

If you're talking about regulation, that's another topic, but that's not what I understood from your post.

thatguydownsouth Name one company that CAN currently Build the Hoover Dam on its own. Without some form of Government help. Name one water Quality Company that CAN provide a City with CLEAN water. Without some Government Help. Private companies that are profit driven. Providing PUBLIC WORKS is disaster in itself.

True. It's not their fault the storms hit.

According to Pat Robertson, natural disasters like this are always the fault of either gays who want to get married, or women who get abortions.

lol

JKiff - You forgot pagans.

Kudos, flagwaver. I was wondering when someone would bring up privatization. I wouldn't go as far as saying government control is the answer, but some regulation is needed. In the new health care law, 80% of premiums must be directed to pay claims. This keeps CEO's from skimming all the cream while frivolously denying patient claims. In the case of utilities, companies should be required to divert some percentage of collections to capital/infrastructure improvements. Remember, the natural gas explosion in CA. It was caused by the same sh!t: crumbling infrastructure. Private companies are pressured to elevate short-term profits, often at the expense of infrastructure improvements, which are admittedly expensive. Flagwaver is correct, there is no evidence that privatization lowers anybody's prices in the long run. We hear this story over and over from the GNOP, and it rarely pans out. Anytime you pay multi-millions to a CEO, and 10-20% to shareholders, these costs ultimately get passed on to consumers. This is good for things we can choose whether or not to buy, but for things we MUST have like healthcare and utilities, it is problematic. The "free market" is not free when the consumer has no choice.

even better than that, gore invented the internet so you could whine about global warming!

@ Rod and Cmon- The climate is changing and this is only the beginning. You watch garbage on FOX and fall for that scam by the fossil fuel industry for twenty years and you become, finally, Willfully Ignorant. The USAF and the Navy are tuned in and you two are tuned out......Do your cars obey the laws of science and physics or is it VOO DOO? You are such a part of the problem it isn't funny......

km2520: The climate is changing and this is only the beginning=Really. WOW last time I checked the Climate has always changed sometimes fast and sometimes slow. The world has been a hot box and the Earth has also been a snow ball. All before man ever existed, Climate changes all the time. Some are short cycles and some are very long cycles.

KM the Earth climate is never constant, its always changing. You can keep believing that man is causing this, but if you look at the data, history and what is happening today you will find that the DATA just does not add up.

LOL Banker...

~12,000 years ago the great lakes were formed by an ice sheet a mile thick that covered
much of that area.

And the scientist who studied it, are pretty darned sure that in about another 12,000 years, the ice will be back.

So, do us a favor and how about dropping the crack-pipe and set aside the adult bevs, until Happy
Hour, at least.

Hahaha! Amateur scientist (Algore…and the like) make me giggle…

just like the movie these yahoos will argue even after the day after tomorrow.

Lorax-you got that right especially the yahoos part

Some people just need to believe the world is burning.

I heard that scientists are claiming the sky is falling...

dude get over this idea!! if you look at historical data, it was just this HOT back in 1912.

It wasn't. From http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/06/120618152733.htm :-

The globally-averaged temperature for May 2012 marked the second warmest May since record keeping began in 1880. May 2012 also marks the 36^th consecutive May and 327^th consecutive month with a global temperature above the 20^th century average.

In any case, whatever the temperatures were then, the simple fact is that our current infrastructure is not capable of dealing with the increasing temperatures today.

This might come as a shock to some, but the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and The Skeptics Society believe that Global Warming is real and it is man made. Think about that for a moment. Skeptics, who make a point of not believing anything you tell them (especially if it sounds fantastic and outlandish like Global Warming) unless they put it through a battery of tests and do everything they can to disprove it first, believe that Global Warming is real and it is man made. For those of you who actually click on links to fact check what a person says let me give you a link to the article on their site:

http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/12-02-08/

You may have to scroll down a bit to get to the article.

For those of you who don't click links, here is an exerpt:

• “It’s just natural climatic variability.” No, it is not. As I detailed in my 2009 book, Greenhouse of the Dinosaurs, geologists and paleoclimatologists know a lot about past greenhouse worlds, and the icehouse planet that has existed for the past 33 million years. We have a good understanding of how and why the Antarctic ice sheet first appeared at that time, and how the Arctic froze over about 3.5 million years ago, beginning the 24 glacial and interglacial episodes of the “Ice Ages” that have occurred since then. We know how variations in the earth’s orbit (the Milankovitch cycles) controls the amount of solar radiation the earth receives, triggering the shifts between glacial and interglacial periods. Our current warm interglacial has already lasted 10,000 years, the duration of most previous interglacials, so if it were not for global warming, we would be headed into the next glacial in the next 1000 years or so. Instead, our pumping greenhouse gases into our atmosphere after they were long trapped in the earth’s crust has pushed the planet into a “super-interglacial,” already warmer than any previous warming period. We can see the “big picture” of climate variability most clearly in the EPICA cores from Antarctica (see Figure 2 below), which show the details of the last 650,000 years of glacial-interglacial cycles. At no time during any previous interglacial did the carbon dioxide levels exceed 300 ppm, even at their very warmest. Our atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are already close to 400 ppm today. The atmosphere is headed to 600 ppm within a few decades, even if we stopped releasing greenhouse gases immediately. This is decidedly not within the normal range of “climatic variability,” but clearly unprecedented in human history. Anyone who says this is “normal variability” has never seen the huge amount of paleoclimatic data that show otherwise.

Thanks to all the noise and confusion over the debate, the general public has only a vague idea of what the debate is really about, and only about half of Americans think global warming is real or that we are to blame.²¹ As in the debate over evolution and creationism, the scientific community is virtually unanimous on what the data demonstrate about anthropogenic global warming. This has been true for over a decade. When science historian Naomi Oreskes²² surveyed all peer-reviewed papers on climate change published between 1993 and 2003 in the world’s leading scientific journal, Science, she found that there were 980 supporting the idea of human-induced global warming and none opposing it. In 2009, Doran and Kendall Zimmerman²³ surveyed all the climate scientists who were familiar with the data. They found that 95–99% agreed that global warming is real and that humans are the reason. In 2010, the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a study that showed that 98% of the scientists who actually do research in climate change are in agreement with anthropogenic global warming.²⁴ Every major scientific organization in the world has endorsed the conclusion of anthropogenic climate change as well. This is a rare degree of agreement within such an independent and cantankerous group as the world’s top scientists. This is the same degree of scientific consensus that scientists have achieved over most major ideas, including gravity, evolution, and relativity. These and only a few other topics in science can claim this degree of agreement among nearly all the world’s leading scientists, especially among everyone who is close to the scientific data and knows the problem intimately. If it were not such a controversial topic politically, there would be almost no interest in debating it, since the evidence is so clear-cut.

It may be global warming, but it is NOT caused by mankind.

Furthermore, many people live in an insular world...just because it is hot where YOU are, doesn't mean it isn't unseasonably cool in another part of the world...

And what makes you think it's NOT caused by human activity, when there's a large body of evidence that shows it is? Other possible causes such as solar variation are insufficient to explain global temperature increases since the 1970s.

Whether climate change exists, or doesn't, and if it does is anthropogenic, doesn't mean bupkus at the end of the day because the only 'solutions' will either rely on everybody voluntarily giving up a substantial portion of their lifestyle or having a powerful government entity force them to do so. Neither is preferable; neither will happen without the end of freedom.

If severe climate change *is* in the forecast (pun intended), we'll do what all of the other animals will do in the face of it: adapt, or die.

My first thought whenever we lose power is to eat up all that ice cream in the freezer so it doesn't go to waste.

It does kinda make power outages something to look foreward to........

Ha! Made me giggle. Thanks!!

Man is rachel - 3673200 and idiot or what! Medicare is one of the best health systems in the world. And if you want the Post Office to work right - How about increasing the stamp to what it should be, about $3.00 a stamp. If that happens you'll be complaining that it's a tax increase. How about going to the post office and pick up your own mail. No more door to door service.

Raise it $3.00 postage? They will just figure how to piss that away to.

well ... a little known fact .... the post office is run so that it is self sustaining .... but congress can raid its kitty any time ... and does regularly to pay for other things ... that is why it is on the ropes now ...

This is Day 5 for my family in Chicago burbs with no power. Its +100 again. The best survival item in our neighborhood, is called a generator.

If you have tress and powerlines, it is a must own item. Not sure why everyone is not on board with this concept.

Lorax-the same thing went on for years with Social Security but it wasn't congress. The Reagan admin started it, and that is all GOP knows how to due is raid from other agencies so they don't offend the wealthly. Now their the ones complaining about how insolvent Social Security is. They only know how to make a mess of things, but not how to fix them.

Crisis...I used to feel that way until I lived with a power worker....those sunny blue sky days...they have turned out to be a farmer hitting a line....some things we can't even understand or know until you work where they do.

Crisis4 is right, though. Pepco was threatened to lose their license last year. Not just regular outages, but horrid restoration times.

I live very few miles away in northern virginia. NOVEC does a great job.

I have PEPCO, and I don't experience these problems. You have to take into consideration that some areas have strict mandates that don't allow tree trimming and removal and also the age of the lines and equipment, etc., etc. I would assume that an older community probably has more outages than communities that are only a few years old and have newer lines and equipment.

In my neighborhood, we're starting to see a lot of water mains bursting because the mains are just getting old. I doubt this happens in new neighborhoods.

Just my two cents, and maybe I'm wrong. *shrug*

I agree. It's amazing to think how strong and resourceful the human race once was, and how weak and dependent we've become. Common sense goes a long way!

I agree. It's amazing to think how strong and resourceful the human race once was, and how weak and dependent we've become. Common sense goes a long way!

O PISS OFF Rick... you stupid democrat

So THAT'S a pretty valid response... grow the hell up, rich

No, rich. You are the one who need to fμck off. Rick speaks the truth.

Then how can they make any overtime $$???

Then you have to worry about people landscaping or digging for other reasons hitting the lines and possibly being electrocuted... they cut phone and water lines like that all the time.

Or when a line breaks, they have more expense and time to dig it up. unlike above ground, they can't see where it is broken so they may have to dig up where it is unnecessary. Being below ground does not always make them unbreakable or when they get old, they have to be replaced whether above or below ground, then they have to charge the customer more for the extra work that will be added to your bill as a tax or fee to cover this

You don't have to see a break. Any reasonably competent electrical engineer can build a device that can tell you where a break has happened. In any case, a buried line isn't going to just break, something has to happen to make it break. Buried lines don't get old either. It's just a piece of metal. If it is correctly protected, which it has to be, it's not going to rust. Ground movement might cause it to break, but you can compensate somewhat for it by leaving it somewhat loose. It'll tighten first before breaking.

I am sure smarter people than me can come up with a bunch of better ways to make it more break-resistant. It's nowhere near a difficult thing to do.

From: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/06/120618152733.htm :-

The globally-averaged temperature for May 2012 marked the second warmest May since record keeping began in 1880. May 2012 also marks the 36^th consecutive May and 327^th consecutive month with a global temperature above the 20^th century average.

The article that you cite just pulls together a bunch of anecdotes of the form "Why it's a bit cooler today." Globally, the world is warming. Significantly.

hey, km, how are those Al Gore carbon offsets working out for ya?

Perhaps the state highway division could have done a better job of alerting - like maybe have signs a few hundred feet before the buckled section with a warning. It looked like the only alert was the orange flags right at the buckle. Certainly not enough time to react.

I also live in Southern California, Craig. But you have to remember, back East, they have the high temps PLUS humidity! Something we don't get in SoCal that often. Dry heat is better than heat with humidity!

Yes, the heat sucks but I'm more worried about the lack of rain where we are at (Indiana). The corn prices (and everything that eats or is produced by something that eats grain) are going to be insane if we don't get some rain. I suppose we just roll with the punches... not much that can be done about it.

Craig, come on out here when it's -20 degrees and 4 feet of snow on the ground... let's see how YOU cope