News

7/8/2010

Heat wave would be worse without electricity

This column is reprinted with permission from Keith Lawrence, a reporter at the Messenger-Inquirer.  It was printed in the Daviess County newspaper on Thursday, July 8.

Back in 1976, I was interviewing a woman who was celebrating her 103rd birthday.

What, I asked, has been the greatest invention of your lifetime?

"Electricity," she said, without hesitation.

She was 3 years old when the telephone was invented.

She was 30 when the Wright brothers made their first flight.

She had seen the arrival of automobiles, movies, radio, television, air conditioning, space travel and so much more.

But electricity, she said, trumped them all.

In 1976, I had never known a world without electricity.

But after the tornado in 2000, the hurricane leftovers in 2008 and the ice storm in 2009, I'm now a veteran of life without electricity.

And I agree with her whole-heartedly.

Kerosene lights and candles may sound romantic.

But they're not very practical sources of light.

And they're hard to read by.

Our world today runs on electricity.

Television, computers, DVD players, microwave ovens, cell phones, refrigerators.

They all need electricity.

And even my natural gas furnace needs electricity to run the blower to warm the house.

I remember life without air-conditioning.  And I definitely don't want to go back there.

Not on a week like this.

How long has it been since you tried to stay cool in the heat and humidity of the Ohio Valley without even a fan?

In 1936, the year before electricity came to most of rural Daviess County, the thermometer climbed to 90 degrees or more on 78 days.

It was 95 degrees or more on 42 days, 100 degrees or more on 22 days and 105 degrees or more on five days.

For nine consectuive days that July, the mercury topped 100 degrees.

The temperature hit 104 on July 7 and didn't drop back into double digits again until July 16.

The local heat record was set that year at 107 degrees on July 13.

That was equaled on June 28, 1944.

It's never been that hot here since.

But if it should get that hot again, it won't feel as bad in our air-conditioned homes and cars.

We take electricity for granted as long as everything works the way it's supposed to.

But when it doesn't -- for days at a time like it was after the tornado, Hurricane Ike and the ice storm -- we realize what electricity really is.

The greatest invention of all time.

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