Charlie Self wrote in
:


Oh, yeah. As soon as we get electricity back (may be 6 more
days), the temps dip under 100, and I get the tree cut off the
house power line, plus shop to replace all food, condiments and
frozen stuff. I'm not sure insurance covers ANY of this: if
that's the case, this is a no vacation year. Fortunately, we're
fewer than 25 miles from the Blue Ridge Parkway and gas has
dropped under three bucks.

Wow, Charlie, I'm sorry to hear about that. I hope they get your power restored sooner than
that.

Check with your insurance agent; the food probably *is* covered, minus whatever
deductible you have on your homeowner's policy. I had that conversation with my agent in
about 1990 -- we lost power in an ice storm, and when the power company told me it might
be a week before they got us hooked up again, I rented a generator[*]. Tried to get the
agent to pay for the generator and gas; no go. If I had let the food in the freezer spoil, they
would have paid to replace it -- a hundred pounds of venison (check how much that would
cost!), plus 50 pounds or so of other meats -- easily over a grand total, but they wouldn't
reimburse $200 for the generator and gas to save five or six times that in food.

* -- I recognize that renting a generator is probably not an option for you; it was for me,
because at the time, we lived in a rural area about twenty miles north of Indianapolis, and
the ice was in a pretty narrow band. Indy got rain, we got ice, twenty miles north of us they
got heavy snow. There were no generators available anywhere in our community or to the
north, but half an hour south of us, a city of a million people all had power, and there were
generators aplenty. You're in a very different circumstance: worse damage, much more
widespread, and the major cities didn't escape it. I bet there isn't a generator available for
rent within 150 miles of you, is there? Sucks.