As I tried to sleep late Wednesday night at my apartment here in Tempe, I was awakened near midnight by a call from my parents about a power situation in my hometown of Coolidge, Arizona. It seems that a microburst had hit Coolidge and about 2,500 APS customers were without power in our city of 11,500.
This may not seem like a big deal to many of you and when I first heard of it, I was more worried about being able to get back to sleep than the state of affairs facing my friends and family back home. As I awoke on Thursday morning to get ready for work, however, I turned on the TV to find that every Phoenix news channel had a news crew in Coolidge to cover what was a more serious matter than I originally thought.
I give this back-story because what ensued in Coolidge and what I found when I got there some 40 hours later was a portion of the city still with no electricity.
While traveling through town and going over to the relief shelter with my father who serves as Mayor of the city, I got to thinking about some of the things in life that we take for granted these days that weren't around many years ago.
For example, my cell phone was fully charged and ready for the day, yet many didn't have theirs with them because they had died due to a lack of electricity to charge them.
Another example was football lights. In football crazy Coolidge, home of the back-to-back defending 3A State Champion Bears, many were concerned about whether or not the football game would go on as planned as the school was in the portion of the city without power.
Many weren't able to bear the heat in their homes in America's third hottest city as the thermostats reached over 90 degrees while the temps outside hovered around 112. How did the people who settled this great state do it, I wondered?
With no air-conditioning, the Arizona portion, basin and range province must have been a miserable place.
It seems that today, we take many things for granted. Arizona is for many, this country's land of opportunity yet it wasn't always that way. Many visionary leaders had to make bold moves in order to have what we have today and to tame this western state.
That vision was all thrown out of the window for 44 hours this past week as people struggled to live a life that was nothing close to what we're used to. Yet when the power came back on, life quickly got back to normal and things were as they were before.
So the next time you come home and see that your clocks in your house or apartment are blinking a 12:00 time, take a deep breath and be glad that your electricity came back on and take solace in the fact that resetting the clocks was the toughest thing you had to deal with.
It's easy to take things like electricity for granted but it's tough to be thankful for what we have. We should never forget that.
T.J. Shope is a Political Science Senior and he can be reached at: tjshope@hotmail.com.
