TOD
When we lose power here, we know it's either because down the road somewhere a tree has fallen on a power line, or because a transformer blew. A couple of times the transformer was somewhere nearby on our street, but occasionally it can be at the big power station a few miles away. Our electric company, whose rates now completely SUCK, is nevertheless pretty good about getting the word out as to what's going on when something happens. And we have a pretty active town group on Facebook, so people are always reporting whatever's going on.
The big outages for me were: (1) the August 2003 blackout for approx. the same hours as DR Elmore posted, (2) the Halloween Nor'easter in 2011, and (3) Hurricane Sandy in 2012. For the latter two we were luckier than most, our outages lasted only a couple of days. But man, were they freezing days. I can't even imagine what it must be like for those who go without it for a week or two weeks. Simply can't imagine.
Those latter two were also the instigators for getting the generator installed. We weren't willing to go through another freezing outage.
Oh yeah, number (4): When the "microburst" (with embedded tornadoes for us) came through in May 2018, we were out for five days, maybe part of a sixth. But we had the generator, so we had refrigerator, etc., air-conditioning, and lights. No TV or internet for those days, just cell service, as I recall.
