Stanford Stories XXIV - Winter

End of February - in Germany and Belgium time for carnival or ski trips. Here in California, we had a diverse week that began with a lovely hike at the Pacific coast south of San Francisco. In extremely beautiful weather, a 15km tour led us over hills with marvelous views to Rockaway Beach. The sun was shining the whole day and temperatures rose to 20° which tricked me into the feeling that winter was over and spring had arrived. As you might have guessed from the title of this post, my conclusion was slightly premature and wrong.

On Tuesday, another winter “storm” hit the Bay area featuring wind gusts that knocked down a few trees here and there. In principle not a big problem, if there weren’t those overhead power lines. Sometime in the afternoon, I got an alert on my phone that parts of the campus and almost the entire city of Menlo Park had lost power because a few power lines were cut by fallen trees. In the beginning I wasn’t too worried, because we still had power in our office and fixing a few power lines shouldn’t be a big deal. Once again, it should turn out that my assessment was completely wrong. When I came home around 9pm, there was still no power. Fortunately, we still had hot water, so spending one night in the dark was no problem. Inexplicably, it took more than 48h to restore power in our street. Something that I didn’t expect in a highly developed country

On Friday morning, after two somewhat spartan nights, we were rewarded with something that is extremely rare in the Bay area. Another storm with heavy precipitation and lower temperatures during the night led to snow on the hills surrounding the Bay area. Fortunately, this time causing no new outages.