Keeping up with the Joneses
IT’S BARELY dawn— 6: 15 a. m.— on a Sunday morning in steamy July. Somebody in the house is up and about, the coffee is already brewed. Then that awful sound. Clunk, clunk. The electricity goes off, flickers back on, then gives up.
The air conditioning’s off. So is the refrigerator. The neighbor’s fancy generator clicks on. No lights are visible anywhere, but it’s hard to tell if any interiors are lit because it’s just about daylight and most people aren’t up yet anyway. First step: fumble for the phone to call the local electric utility, which dutifully records the outage but delivers minimal information on its extent.
How to find out more? In some neighborhoods, such as Little Rock’s Hillcrest, that’s easy. Look at your cellphone. A private social network called Nextdoor Hillcrest is already posting input from others in the community: Power is out on C Street. Power out on Oakwood. Power out in Stifft Station. Estimated repair time is 9 a. m.
Nextdoor, a nationwide network with a presence in 147,000 neighborhoods across the country ( including areas in Benton, Fayetteville, Eureka Springs, Fort Smith, Jonesboro, and elsewhere in Arkansas) is an easy way for neighbors to communicate online via text messages. The joining process involves confirming your address before registering for a neighborhood. And it’s free.
Most of the time the messages involve stray dogs trotting down streets, car break- ins ( please, people, lock your car doors!), stuff that’s for sale, giveaways, suspicious people wandering the streets, recommendations for repair sources, details about what’s going on at a busy corner where cops are gathering, and opinions about whether that noise last night was a gunshot or a car backfiring.
Around 2,239 customers were without power in Hillcrest and Stifft Station Sunday morning. Service was restored about 8: 15 a. m., around two hours after it went out.
“A serviceman is working to determine the cause of your outage,” a message from the utility read. “Power will be restored as soon as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience.” Efficient, yes, but rather cool and impersonal. Nextdoor Hillcrest makes such inconveniences bearable by adding a human touch.