Taken from a Peak Oil blog:

All, This past couple of week have been a little crazy for us here in Buffalo, NY. A surprise winter storm dumped more then two feet of snow on us. Normally, two feet of show would not even be worth mentioning in Western NY - we can get that in an hour here.

This was different.

This freak storm dumped very heavy wet snow on the city - it stuck to everything, most importantly trees and power lines. In the span of 24 hours most of Western New York fell dark and more then 90% of its mature trees where damaged. Having lived in Western New York my whole life, I've never seen anything like it. It really does look like a hurricane went through here. Though most homes weren't damages, the place is a mess... We've had bad snow falls before and certianly power outages but this was different.

The wide spread nature of the outages caused panic buying, hoarding and price gouging. Though most people where good about the whole thing, I just can't resist drawing the parallels between what was happening here and global peak oil. Even my fiancee, who would rather not think about peak oil at all couldn't ignore the similarities. It underscored the dependencies that we have on energy.

We couldn't power anything in our home (because there was no electricity), we couldn't fuel our cars or generator (because the gas pumps didn't work), our furnace didn't work (because of no electricity), our water was contaminated (the power failures caused a "boil water" alert for all of our county) and in many places the sewer system failed (the pumps didn't work because of the electrical failures), our cable and phone lines are laying on our driveway (only our cell phones work). So as a result one snow storm that dumped a modest amount of snow on our city, virtually all of our public utilities failed.

Can you imagine what will happen if oil becomes scarce? Or natural gas?

We went to a birthday party on saturday (the third night of the black outs) in a affluent suburban neighborhood. Almost all of the homes had a generator of some kind and the noise of the all those engines running was almost deafening. I couldn't imagine what these people will do when peak oil robs them of even this safety net - when money can't buy them out of the crisis. Those with distain for suburbanites will probably find it almost funny.

I can hear the suburbanites now, "how can this happen?", "When will it go back to 'normal'?", "We shouldn't have to deal with this!", "Can't we bomb someone for this?", "Why don't we just go over there and take their oil?" I can see the fights breaking out at the gas pumps and the stores for the last bits of supplies. I can imagine the confusion and chaos - we where very close to that here for a while and all because of a few snow flakes...

The thing about this snow fall is that we all knew it was temporary. We all knew the power would come on eventually, and stay on. We all knew we could heat our homes again soon. We all knew that shipments of food, fuel and other necessities where on their way from 'unaffected areas'. But what if it wasn't temporary? What if the heat didn't come back on? What if there where no 'unaffected areas'?

This experience has shown me that the worst predictions of global peak oil are not only possible, but likely - and dangerously so... It also highlighted the areas where I am unprepared which I am thankful for. And it gave me a very scary taste of things to come.

Victor
A semi-prepared suburbanite near Buffalo, NY