Steve 'Flash' JuonUPDATE for August 6th: The power is back on at home! Thank you to everyone who reached out and or helped. I’m sure there are people who would rather remain anonymous so I’ll just list them by their initials — A.R., M.D., H.C., D.G. and last but not least S.C., a friend of the late Derek Barbosa who was the first to offer their support. I’m extremely grateful to you all!
UPDATE for August 5th: We’re on day six without electricity. Thank you to everyone who has reached out so far! We’re hopeful that OPPD will have power restored by Wednesday — hopeful but not 100% confident. TL/DR? Click here to help now! Otherwise the original update is below.
August 3rd, 2024. It’s not in my nature to ask for help. I feel weird enough asking people to support RapReviews on Patreon on a monthly basis, even though I recognize it’s a service that has value and which people want to see stay online. Unfortunately circumstances have taken a rather difficult turn since Wednesday, July 31st. A severe storm ripped through the Omaha metro with wind speeds estimated at anywhere from 70-90 mph. The National Weather Service that “despite the widespread wind damage, this line of storms did not meet the criteria to be classified as a derecho.” Widespread is certainly the word for it. This is a photo from near our old apartment complex on Blondo.
We have been without power now going on four straight days. We’ve lost all the food in our fridge and our freezer, and we’ve been living like nomads with any friends or relatives who will take us in, but even when the lodging is free we still have to eat and put gas in the car. OPPD has gotten the number of customers affected from over 200,000 to just above 50,000, but they’re estimating that the hardest hits areas could take up to eight days to fully restore. We’re already halfway there so I don’t expect to see our power come back on any time soon.
There are two ways you can help us in this situation. The monthly patrons mentioned in the opening paragraph already do help us with webhosting and bandwidth (thank you) but our short term expenses keep going up. It’s not just food, gas or lodging — we don’t have a chainsaw or a pickup truck and we’re going to have to hire somebody to remove all the dead tree limbs around our home. If you feel so inclined, you can PayPal a one time donation here that will keep us going until the electricity is back on. If you want to share this article or the link paypal.me/SteveFlashJuon with anybody else, please feel free to do so as well. Thank you for anything you can do and thank you to all the hard working utility people from OPPD and the surrounding area who are working hard to get us back on the grid. We are grateful for all the support.
Sincerely,
Steve ‘Flash’ Juon, RR EIC