"Good Luck. We're All Counting On You."

Here we are well into Day 4 of the most widespread power outage in recorded memory in the Cincinnati area and Duke Energy it looks like Duke Energy is going to miss its goal of having 85% of customers up and running by the end of today.

The outage map is still lit up like a Christmas tree, but there are only a few big, concentrated pockets of 2500+ customers out in the same area.

As the cable line to Camp Axinar was only restored last night, I have not seen what the outage map looked like on Sunday night or Monday at the height of the power crisis.

What seems to be the most deplorable behavior of the hour is that Duke Energy crews and office workers are being threatened with bodily harm apparently by certain residents of Clermont County.

Clermont County Sheriff A.J. "Tim" Rodenberg is moving deputies into place to protect the Duke Energy crews.

In northeast Hamilton county things are returning to normal as more and more stores and intersections have power restored.

One phrase making the rounds to describe this event is "Survivor Cincinnati" because more power was out even than the Blizzard of 1978 and superlatively more power was out than any single tornado event in anyone's memory.

It was quite amazing to see how many other systems are hopelessly dependent upon the power grid.

With such a large part of the area affected, gas pumps failed and then water distribution pumps failed. Many areas were on boil water advisories and water pressure in many systems got decidedly low.

Let me tell you - I'm thinking people need to REALLY start thinking about keeping 3 - 4 days of C-rations on hand for everyone in the house, a staggering amount of bottled waters and all the generators and XPower devices they can handle.

Despite Mrs. Axinar constantly accusing me of being paranoid, there can be REAL disruptions to basic services that can go on for DAYS and even WEEKS and people need to prepare for that ...