Where I live was on the trailing edge of the big bombogenesis storm event earlier this week. It's defined as the barometric pressure dropping 24 milibars in 24 hours, similar to the eye of a hurricane, and they usually happen over the oceans not over Kansas/Nebraska. We were all warned to expect blizzard conditions, and local emergency management offices did a good job warning people to prepare to stay home the day of the storm. Schools and offices closed in anticipation, and people stayed home.

There was about seven inches of snow here, and my renter had to borrow my four wheel drive truck to get up the driveway in order to go to work the day after the storm.

The big hassle of the day was that Facebook suffered a world-wide crash due to some server maintenance they instigated, so it was impossible to post updates about the storm. Oddly, some people were able to post, so that added to the confusion. And before I found out about the outage, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what was wrong with my Facebook configuration.

We don't have cell phone coverage in our mountain canyon, so it's hard for people to depend on it for updates during power outages.

The good thing about a disruption like this is makes us realize that we need alternative methods for reaching our community members to update them with important information. It's the type that falls short of the extreme emergency bulletins where the local government uses Reverse 9-1-1 to get the word out.

The way I found out there was a Facebook outage was through an email sent by the nearby town, so I am thinking of telling everyone in the community groups to sign up their email addresses with the town so they've got that fall-back.

Meanwhile, the sun is out today, the snow is melting, and warmer days are coming, but we hope to get some more good-size snow storms in the next several weeks.