Having lived in Norway most of my 40+ years on this earth, I can with some confidence say that this is not an universal truth. I don’t think I’ve experienced any power interruption of over 1 hour in winter ever, and it’s been at least 5 years since the last time. Yes it snows here. A lot.
I would add that you should have a backup plan for preparing any holiday meal using a camping stove because the power could go out an hour into roasting a turkey. In fact don’t invite anyone over unless you’ve confirmed ahead of time that they don’t mind sleeping in the same room, together with your family, in front of the wood stove. This could happen even on a clear day. Don’t rely on the electricity in the winter ever.
I live on the west side of puget sound, and get two nines of utility power. Undergrounding distribution lines is very expensive given the natural expenses of undergrounding and the shallow soil most of the region has. Undergrounding transmission lines is basically not happening outside of very special cases. Shallow soil also makes trees less stable, so that makes treefall -> utility outage more probable. Roads can get pretty nasty in winter storms too which also contributes to high time to repair.
People can say "bad infrastructure" all you want, but nobody wants to pay a lot more to fight geography for one more nine. Also at least in my community, every tree is sacred even though it's all third growth backfill from multiple clear cuts over the past who knows.
Article doesn't even mention cell towers go down in extended outages. Around me, it's about 4-6 hours, a little longer overnight, but only 30 minutes past when people wake up.
Not just outside, I spent 15 years in/around Austin and it got to be ridiculous.
2020 - cleared out the stores at covid.. alright, few people were prepared, none had done it before
2021 - cleared out the stores for the blizzard, lost power for 45min and water for 5 days.. almost no one was prepared, despite the year before
2023 - cleared out the stores for the blizzard, lost power for days due to heavy icing.. some were prepared but not at scale
Some people just don't learn.
Luckily after '20, we prepared. Then in '21, we moved to rural Texas and got solar+battery backup so 2023 wasn't even a blip.
But people still do have chalets/huts in the mountains, and the authorities won't spend money on burying 10 km of cables in complicated terrain just for a small hut colony or a solitary hut. Which means that the cables go through the air, which means that a fallen tree can sever them, and you won't be particularly prioritized. That said, people who actually live there or spend longer holidays there during winter months, tend to have enough firewood collected to survive such situations comfortably.
It is a different story in cities/villages with compact house patterns. I don't think I ever saw a snow-related blackout in such a place. There, your worst risk is actually flooding. We've had some serious floods in the last decades, and even buried cables will get damaged and short-circuited in such an event. For example, the cable needs to cross a stream, so it is attached to a bridge, high water comes and tears down the entire bridge with the cable as well.
That said I remember power could go out from a lightning storm or without any reason. But pretty rarely
He said they tended to build “two of everything,” which is why there’s so many sets of two.
If one craps out, the second can be used in its place, or scavenged for parts.
I live in Mammoth where the town is significantly snowier than say Truckee or lake level Tahoe. The grocery store is open and operating normally no matter how snowy it is. Including the 22/23 winter when 695" fell in town. Lots of buildings did collapse that year though and snow removal was a constant struggle.
But A-frames or other very angled roofs are not typical here, roofs have to handle 300 lbs/sq foot, and there are requirements for where a roof is allowed to shed to. Typically they will angle in one direction to control where shedding happens. Keeping the snow on the roof also provides insulation, in a typical snow year we may do basically no removal and just have a blanket of snow on the roof the whole winter.
Snow can be bad enough to a point where even modern cement build building can have trouble.
EDIT: I didn't realize A-frame refers to a _very_ steep angle instead of "just" a slightly steeply tilted roof.
And A-frame roof help but do _not_ magically fix it, with the right kind of snow condition it can get stuck to the roof anyway and turn into ice there. This can be dangerous in 2 ways. 1. Weight and 2. if it randomly comes all crashing down potentially hitting people. And sure it's should be a rare exception if you have stable build buildings. But rare exceptions happens anyway even in places with good infrastructure and/or cities etc.
Similar while power outages really should not happen, sometimes there are natural catastrophes (or terrorist attacks) and power is gone for days anyway.
Being prepared helps. Even if it's a situation which counts as natural disaster and external help will be provided, knowing that you aren't reliant on it and they can focus on people much more in need is nice.
PS: I'm not a preper or anything, just prepared in the sense of basic knowledge and some minimal preparations like flash lights, water, food you can eat without stove, a larger battery, somewhat weather proof clothes, etc. Nothing fancy, nothing usable long term. Just enough to bridge some days of an local emergency situation.
A-frames are steeply-angled enough that the weight mostly loads on itself (i.e. a snow drift builds up against the side of the house) rather than loading the roof. The whole point of the design is to be steeper than the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angle_of_repose of snow, so that snow can't pile up on the roof to the point that it forms ice; it must slough off quickly, as soon as it reaches some aggregation threshold — just like water droplets must drip down off a shower door after some aggregation threshold.
("Slow" snowfall, meanwhile, gets melted away rather than frozen on; the A-frame is the entire building envelope, and is also usually made of a highly thermally-conductive material; together, these properties mean that 99% of heat lost from the interior is lost into this giant metal heatsink that wraps around the building, where the heat then conducts quickly inside that giant metal heatsink, warming up whatever cold spots there are anywhere along its surface. As long as the building has any kind of heating going on inside, the roof is essentially acting like a heated windshield.)
A-frames also go all the way to the ground. There's nowhere for a person to stand where "snow (or even ice) sloughing off the sides" is dangerous, because there's never a plummet phase to that slough-off; the snow arrives at the ground with very little speed, having been lightly friction-braked the whole time, since it was basically sliding down a metal slide. (That being said, you would never build an A-frame house under the expectation of having accessible sidewalks around it during the winter. You assume that snow drifts will pile up on both sides. You want to go to the back yard? You go through the house. This is also why you never see an A-frame surrounded with a fence: the inevitable snowdrift would knock any side-fences over.)
Outages that long aren't common, but it's not uncommon to lose power for about a day a few times each winter.
Home design is a game of engineering tradeoffs with the occasional new technology to improve things or lower costs.
enough snow, especially if compacted, especially if it involves melting + refreezing cycles turning part of it too ice and even robust concrete building can have some surprising issues
but it's true that for what most places in the world need a slightly tilted and structural stable roof is good enough, if you know how to clean it if things to south
As TFA emphasizes, grid electricity is unstable in rural places in winter; which means that even if such a building were able to be grid-connected (often not), and even if the building's owner was willing to spend electricity heating the building year-round in their absence (almost certainly not), the building would be likely to lose electricity at the worst possible moment: when there's tons of snow piling up and no humans there to shovel it.
A-frame or even 45degree angle roofs are very rare.
The other benefit of an A-frame is that the snow drifts deeply enough that winter-only cabins don't need as much insulation, because there's a 4m drift on all sides except the front.
Those kinds of places are also where you find "doors to nowhere" on the 2nd floor, because that's the winter access. One door at ground level for summer, one door ~1.5-2m up for winter.
I love visiting, but I'll never live there!
Helsinki, for example, only gets a total of ~90cm a year. So the mountain sees more snow in a single event some years than Helsinki all year.
Upwards of 80cm in finnish lapland, so quite a bit of snow, but not the ~2-3 meters common in the high sierras and cascades. This is mostly because the elevation is low and the sea exposure is smaller (wind blows from the pacific over the mountain and dumps snow). The Paradise Snowtel on Rainier, for example, routinely has 3-6 meters / 10-20 feet of snow in winter, and is one of the snowiest places on earth. The only place I'm aware of that has more is Aomori Prefecture in Japan and they have similar geography.
I have lived in Norway all of my >45 years on this earth and I can say that in the first half of my life were I lived on the west coast, power outages was totally expected.
We had a generator, and we had a gas stove ("everyone" in Norway use electricity for cooking) for those days, a kerose lamp and a wood stove.
The longest power outage I experienced was 3 days, somewhere around 1986 I think, but a few hours could happen multiple times and overnight outages were not unusual.
> Ottawa Hydro restored power to just over half its customers after one week
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_2022_Canadian_derecho
Fortunately, you can't freeze to death in May, and the roads are clear so you just go to where the power is.
I live in a formerly industrial city in the US that gets serious snow every year and probably a multi foot storm every couple years. My power outages in the past decade consist of several seconds long blips and one 1hr outage at 8am on a national holiday when a transformer on my street went bang.
My extended family lives hundreds of miles away in the same state, in a lesser snow climate in a city within spitting distance of the same population and density. They have power outages out the wazoo because the utilities can't cut trees and can't update infrastructure without the towns acting as a roadblock at the behest of a bunch of Karens who don't wan't their decorative 100yo trees losing limb and don't want construction activity to maintain or improve anything (not just utilities, they're actually less burdened but burdened nonetheless) performed without intentionally prohibitive and expensive environmental study this and approval that and so of course less gets done proactively.
I'll leave assuming the demographic makeup of these cities and relative wealth levels up to the reader but I assure you it tracks stereotypes.
Even when I was living in the snowier parts of America we didnt lose power. I would say losing power is not a universal truth in the slightest.
Since that storm, we have decided to buy a second fireplace for upstairs with a cooking top.
Whatever weather people are used to will be handled seamlessly. If it's unusual, it will cause failures. Doesn't really matter what kind of weather it is.
This is basically the Netflix Chaos Monkey theory of systems, applied to weather response.
(A friend of mine lives in Shanghai. She's shocked whenever I mention a power failure; in her mind, a functioning country wouldn't have them at all.)
Seems to be a maintenance issue, trees are not cleared well enough. Sambo said that the warmer winters make the trees more likely to fall over.
like if a typical winter is slightly but consistently below 0C then a warmer winter would have
- more black ice
- more ice rain
- more snow melting and refreezing (so ice on roofs, ground or trees etc.)
- wetter snow (so heavier)
etc.
Through where I live it is/was the opposite this year. Normally we have mostly above 0C degrees and rarely ice rain/black ice or similar. Also some way colder days (-10C and below) too cold to have much ice issues. This year for ~a month the temperature did non stop bounce between enough above 0 during the day to slightly melt things (but not fully) and below 0 at evening + cold ground to fully freeze any water produced by melting. So non stop icy walkways, streets etc. for nearly a month. During the last days before it got warmer some unmaintained walk way I passed by had 4cm of solid ice on it. At the same time it wasn't cold enough to do ice skating on lakes. It really wasn't a nice winter.
It can take days to bring a grid back up after a major outage. The lead time to replace a city-sized transformer is nearly 4 years, now (ask Puerto Rico about that).
https://www.powermag.com/the-transformer-crisis-an-industry-...
We have buried lines and have few if any power issues. richer town a bit over does not, and loses power once a winter or so.
If I remember correctly, buried lines in our area cost around $1 million per mile and they estimated something like $100 billion to do the whole city. It's also 10 times more expensive to repair when repairs are needed. That's why they use poles in less dense areas.
[1] https://www.wthr.com/article/news/for-fourth-time-explosion-...
So everyone expects multiple power off a year and every household has generators and stock of fuel and matches for emergency.
Locals have a “it’s gonna be fine” attitude against a poor (but expensive) infrastructure. I was really disappointed, growing up in Europe, where a power off it’s extremely rare (even if we have rain and snow).
More of a it's not going to be fine but we will deal with it.
1000+KMs away in/not far from the capital city of Queensland it's not unheard of to have a multi-day power outage after a severe storm.
Considering QLD is almost 6x the size of Norway it's not actually that bad.
The Tapani storm was such a divisive experience. In the city the only effect of the storm I remember was that the windows were ringing quite a bit that night. Otherwise nothing out of the ordinary.
This just isn’t true, at all - electricity is regularly out for hundreds or thousands of people in Sweden because of snow. This year was especially bad, where thousands were without any electricity for up to 10 or 12 days, but every year brings the same problems. Just google “elavbrott snö” and you’ll find many current examples - just as one instance:
https://www.horisontmagasin.se/2026/01/06/nya-elavbrott-nu-p...
They've also lost power from rolling blackouts due to not having enough power plants, but that's a California thing, at least compared to first-world countries. In a similar vein, a substation in the city my dad grew up in was once taken out by a sniper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack
I lived through two >24hr power outages at my previous place that had buried power lines into the subdivision. Both due to lightning strikes on trees that happened to be close to the buried lines. The lightning then fed into the line, and you could literally see black scorch marks on the lawn that followed the wiring until it eventually dissipated.
This required digging up 30-40ft of melted wiring each time and re-running it. These appeared to be direct-burial cables fwiw.
Talking to the utility guys, it was pretty common for this to be the failure mode. I found it pretty interesting and somewhat ironic.
I don't think that's something that can be solved with just "build quality"... but it presumably could be solved through "maintainence" (cutting down or trimming trees, although that requires identifying the problem, permissions, a willingness to have decreased tree coverage, etc.)
I lived in the Oklahoma and in Minnesota, and the difference there is already stark:
* OK suffered from plenty of storm-induced winter power outages (massive freezing rain cycles were common in my life). My mother's cotton bath robe, which she kept using until late in her life, had burn marks from when she reached for something over a lit candle during a power outage when I was four years old.
* MN suffers some, but people knew to develop meaningful contingency plans.
Both states have variegated buried-power-to-the-premises usage. It's not really to be expected as the norm in either place, but MN has far more than OK (funnily enough I grew up in a place in OK with it). Either way, the infrastructure robustness in North America looks like it arose from a dismal cost-benefit analysis versus a societal welfare consideration.
I left North America about 14 years ago for Europe. The difference is stark. We've only had one significant power interruption in that time (not even in winter); whereas stochastic neighborhood outages were commonplace in North America. What really freaks me out about the situation in North America is just the poor insulation of the structures and their low thermal mass. They will get cold fast.
Aside: A lot of friends and family in North America balked at the idea of getting a heat pump due to performance during a power outage: "when the power goes out, I can still run my gas." When I asked them whether the house was heated with forced air or used an electronic thermostatic switches, the snarky smile turned to a grimace.
When you live in a cold place, you learn to do things differently. You're naive if you don't pack warm blankets and water in your vehicle, for instance. You never know when you might find yourself stranded somewhere due to vehicular breakdown …
I believe this has to do with the design of the North American split phase vs European three-phase grid. The European grid has more centralized, larger neighborhood step-down transformers, whereas the US has many more decentralized smaller pole-mounted transformers. NA proponents say any given outage will affect fewer people, EU proponents say it's easier to maintain fewer pieces of infrastructure.
(That said I live in Japan where we have a US-style grid and have only had like 2, <5 min outages during typhoons and nothing else so maybe it's just the quality of the maintenance)
yes, obviously "put on your own oxygen mask before helping others" (so you remain an asset instead of a liability), but please remember the "helping others" part (so you remain an asset instead of a liability).
In the population wise very small county here I live in Sweden we haven't come that far yet, so when the storms a while ago did their thing some people were without power for several days. Mine was out for some six hours or so. The forests around here look like "plukkepinn" and tore down many, many above ground power lines.
When I grew up in the late eighties, early nineties further south we had interruptions at every other thunderstorm and most regular storms. This is one reason why we had a wood stove and self-circulation for heating rather than a heat pump. Around the turn of the millenium they buried the power lines and since then my family there see almost no interruptions.
But it can happen anywhere, so you should be prepared anyway. Like I'm living in a city and had a surprise 5 day power outage this winter. And it's not a place with bad infrastructure I can't remember any noticeable power outage in the last 8+ years. But unusual shit happened and power was gone for days.
Luckily it wasn't too cold. But at the last night before power was returned it was 10C in my room. Not too bad if you are prepared, very much bad if you are not (as it was the last day I was kinda half prepared, that night did suck).
I think this comes back to the framing of the article, stated as universal truths when it's really just someone who was woefully unprepared for a snow storm and subsequent power outage. Life threatening and horribly inconvenient for them yes, but nowhere near a universal experience.
Prepare a few days ahead getting groceries, gas, etc. Make sure firewood totes are full. It starts snowing. Do a little shovel work to keep fire fed, if power goes out (rare, but always possible of course) a little more shovel work to set up generator. Wait for snow to stop, clean up with snowblower/tractor/shovels/etc, taking a variable number of sessions depending on how much snow fell.
The main lesson is "be prepared", not all the little things the author got surprised by due to a wholesale lack of preparation.
I can still hear all the trees just exploding. It was wild.
How does that compare to Norway?
Regardless, "my power never goes out" isn't a great plan for what to do if your power goes out. Ask Texas, they once thought the same.
they're expecting to spend 10B burying lines in the mountains.
New england is pretty much one big rock garden/shelf where you're not digging through soil in alot of places but rock ledges.