Finally, an actual severe thunderstorm

Wednesday morning, approximately 5:15am, a severe thunderstorm belted the region. Peak wind at the airport ASOS (about 2.5 miles west of here) was 75mph, and there was lightning, so it definitely was a severe thunderstorm. The wind was aimed directly at the bedroom window, so I awakened to what sounded like a fire hose spraying the window. So did Brat, which caused some amount of terror until she realized it *wasn't* a car wash.

This storm knocked out a decent amount of electrical service, leaving about 33,000 without power at its peak. The wind was greater than we usually see, even for summer storms, and the ground is nice and winter-soggy. Annoyingly, even as power was getting restored, winds picked up yesterday and took out a few of the temporary fixes. It's going to be a tenacious next couple of months while the local grid is rebuilt.

The widespread outages also brought one of my more major pet peeves back to the forefront: dead traffic signals and the response to them. As everyone with a brain knows, an out-of-service traffic signal is to be treated as a four-way stop. Unfortunately, not everyone remembers this, and Marjorie Falk of Penfield is dead, most likely due to another driver's ignorance of this law.

At the end of the day, responsibility for safe driving lies with the drivers in command of all vehicles. However, I believe one particular change in recent years has contributed to this problem. Previously, when a traffic signal at a major intersection was out of service for an extended period, the sheriff's department (or someone else, I can't recall the exact details) would post a portable four-way stop sign in the intersection as a bit of a reminder.

Unfortunately, a few years back, the policy was changed. No longer will the sheriff's department put such signs in intersections, because obviously, everyone knows it's supposed to be treated as a four-way stop, right? This measure was adopted as a cost-cutting measure towards the beginning of our catastrophically useless county executive's term, if I recall correctly. (Unfortunately, I can't find an exact cite for this other than my memory, so take this paragraph with a grain of salt until someone finds a link to the news.)

Anyone who has driven around Monroe County during a power outage knows that not everyone knows this. This inevitably leads to at least a couple traffic accidents, most of which are minor, but some of which (e.g. the one above, at Pittsford-Palmyra and Kreag just north of Bushnell's Basin) result in unnecessary deaths.

My policy? If I see a situation where people are not stopping at a dead traffic signal, I will call 911 to report it. At the very least, it'll be logged. At best, a temporary stop sign will be posted and maybe people will pay attention to that.

In the long run, folks just need to remember to treat dead traffic signals as four-way stops. I'm not sure how to do this short of public floggings, but maybe someone has a better way.