I feel like I’m in some sort of slapstick comedy with our city pratfalls. I’m in Los Angeles for the holidays which has been somewhat pleasant except for the modest signs of barely contained emergent chaos.
Which I frankly don’t expect to see we are staying in a very bougie neighborhood called Marina Del Rey. I figured the wealth that holds it together would make it more navigable. Lol.
There is something extremely funny about leaving your cozy Montana home with its backup solar power and multiple heating systems only to find yourself in an large apartment building on a rickety grid in an enormous city over which you have no control.
Last night around 11pm there was massive power outage affecting much of Marina Del Rey. Alex was already asleep having had a busy day so when the power dropped I didn’t want to wake him.
I went to fill up containers with water just in case we needed to flush the toilets as we are on an upper floor. I took a few pictures and went to bed with earplugs in and an eye mask figuring it would resolve itself.
Alex woke up at 6am and the power was still out. He had been working so nothing was charged and we had no WiFi. It was dark out as he started his work day on east Coast hours
It turned out the outrages were larger than just the complex around us. Twitter had some estimates for who was without power but we weren’t the only family members without power or water in the neighborhood.
Mind you this is the beachfront south of Santa Monica so a pretty upscale area populated by Silicon Beach types. It is unincorporated community in Los Angeles county which complicates its infrastructure.
The outage stretched on into mid morning. The car we had rented was trapped in the garage with the power out. The elevators were obviously not working and we were quite a few floors up. We couldn’t shower or wash up. Thankfully I had water for the toilets to flush.
It all felt a little dramatic for what should be a pretty normal day. Imagine if there had been an actual storm or an earthquake. Complaining about it on Twitter was made humorous given our friends know we are the types to do preparedness planning. We are all at the mercy of a blown transformer. So make sure you keep extra water on hand.