Yeah, St. Louis area, and there are still hundreds of thousands of houses without power. Electric company said that storm caused more infrastructure damage than any storm in their history, which goes back a hundred years. I thought I had it bad being without power for going on 3 days, but apparently I'm one of the lucky ones, since only about a quarter of those who lost power have regained it.

At least the temps let up and dropped into the 80s, so fewer people are dying from the heat. Thursday was just brutal though, 102 and no electricity, no hotel rooms available anywhere, and virtually nobody selling ice. Some electrical contractor driving in from Iowa called one of the local radio stations (I listened in the car, while I ran the car AC, heh), and he said he saw a caravan more than 2 miles long of electrical contractors and other help driving toward the area, so hopefully everyone will have power back this coming week.

One kinda sad thing about it is the order in which they are restoring power. It's by zipcode, and it seems as if they're getting the more affluent zipcodes up first, which translates to a form of racism: the more minority/poor neighborhoods will likely be last to get their power restored. While that was nice for me (zipcode of an affluent area, by 50 feet, even though my neighborhood is really more middle class), I don't really know if that's the fairest way to do it. Most profitable for the electric company, yes, I'm sure it is. But not really fair to people overall. Probably should have been done with some kind of lottery system or something.