From cool mountains to Florida’s extreme heat — and a four-hour power outage! | Opinion

What a homecoming from summer travels in the mountains of Western Pennsylvania.

Thanks, Florida Power & Light!

I returned to flat South Florida from a week’s vacation to record-setting extreme heat, 94 degrees at noon on Tuesday that felt more like 100+ and, poof, apagón — a blackout a la Cuba. The electricity is gone in my end of our scorching world, taking along with it Comcast and all internet service.

I wait, and wait, for the return of civility.

This isn’t, after all, poor Cuba, where electricity is rationed and outages can last all day long.

But tough luck on this, the hottest-ever recorded summer in our warming globe. A four-hour power outage in the middle of the day, from 12:12 pm to 4:14 pm, plagued 1,636 of us who live on the west side of Miami Lakes.

The reason given to customers: Damage to FPL equipment.

Unrelenting heat no joke

Long exposure to heat, which can have grave health and economic repercussions, is no joke.

I had a taste of what prolonged time in the heat can do when I recently spent too much time mowing, weeding and raking.

Too hot, too humid, my brain was telling me to rest, but I wasn’t listening — until I felt nauseous and dizzy. I got off easy. I lost a day’s work.

Unlike with an oncoming hurricane, there’s no warning, no prep time to cope with a long-lasting power outage in this new world of climate change-induced conditions. The situation is made worse because losing electricity also leaves you without other much-needed services.

No Wi-Fi.

Only a tiny bar was visible on my iPhone, sitting there like a lonely tip of an iceberg dropped on its side.

“SOS Only,” the phone ominously read right after a last call rings — from the boss — and you’re uselessly screaming “hello, hello.”

There’s nobody there.

You’ve been officially cut off from the world.

How hot is South Florida? Beach sand was 137 degrees and playground floor reached 177

Perishables in the fridge

There there the loss of perishables in the refrigerator.

The power went off as I was walking in the door and rushing to store $189.30 worth of groceries from Whole Foods — mostly seafood, poultry, sushi, cheese, milk, salads and other vegetables that require refrigeration.

Silly me, hadn’t even noticed the electricity gone, but one of the smoke alarms started beeping.

Darn it, do I have a new 9V battery somewhere?

I thought the problem was that small until I opened my darkened refrigerator and realized what was happening — one appliance at a time. The stove’s clock was off and Alexa was silent when I coaxed her to wake up: “Good Morning!”

Mitigation mode

A hurricane pro by now, I went into mitigation mode — disaster from the loss of food and money was abated by one factor: Early June, whether there’s a hurricane or not menacing the Caribbean, I prep for storms and/or power outages by stashing mounds of ice in different sized Ziploc bags in the freezer.

So I ice-packed the most at-risk food and prayed that the rest would survive in the still-cool refrigerator. I ate the sushi for lunch, followed later, when the outage seemed interminable, by a snack pack of salmon flakes, plus cucumber and radish slices.

With all the electronics out and no one to talk to, I read a week-old Sunday New York Times I bought at Pittsburgh’s Indie Riverstone Books. And I consoled myself thinking that I can survive any apocalypse as long as I’m surrounded by the thousands of books I own.

But, can I really?

Hurricane prediction raised for remaining season, thanks to a steamy Atlantic Ocean

Never as prepared as you think

The personal fan I bought with a rechargeable battery and a six-hour run time didn’t work. I should’ve checked it, instead of buying and storing it awaiting a hurricane.

Likewise, a charging stick had barely enough juice to add a few percentage points to the phone.

I started a pricey to-get list of improvements: Install a generator. Upgrade charging/connection capacity — and quickly recognized how privileged I am to be able to do so while others not only suffer in Cuba but right here in the United States, hailed as the richest country in the world.

No matter how much I tried to not let the power outage ruin my last day of vacation, the familiar anxiety of hurricane season kicked in.

I had been happily roaming the gorgeously green and summer-hot — yet, cooler — Laurel Highlands, so much so that I canceled my return flight and opted for the 1,223-mile drive through West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida.

Blame that move on my infatuation with John Steinbeck’s classic, “Travels with Charley,” his epic 1960 account of cross-country travel with his dog to take the country’s temperature. As Steinbeck brilliantly put it, “People don’t take trips — trips take people.”

That’s exactly what happened to me.

In West Virginia, the GPS instructed me to get off Route 79 — then, left me stranded on a “scenic” but endlessly “No service” road going around a mountain as if I were on a carousel. The only soul in sight, a man standing outside a trailer that has seen better days, wanted me to go inside to use his alleged internet. But this old newshound knows better.

I kept driving south, reaching the town of Clay, where there was internet, though I no longer trusted it — and three locals at a nice gas station fought over which route I should take.

The experience turned into a priceless travel moment, but by the time I made it home past midnight on Tuesday, all I wanted was to kiss my cool, tiled floor.

Extreme heat to stay

The joy was short-lived, but distress is the better teacher.

Many of us have invested in wind protection by installing hurricane-impact windows, and finally this year in Miami-Dade, low-income residents are getting some financial assistance to do so from the government.

But the warming Earth is more complicated — and here to stay. This summer’s experience calls for still more ways to better prepare for extreme heat situations and new policies from government and service providers.

Tuesday’s prolonged outage wasn’t due to a construction accident nor the result of increased demand from extreme heat on the power grid, FPL spokesman Shawn Johnson told me Friday.

“Some underground equipment went bad and had to be replaced,” he said.

The company said in a statement: “Initially, roughly 2,400 customers were impacted by the outage, but FPL crews restored service to half of those customers within about 30 minutes using smart grid technology.”

Here’s hoping everyone in South Florida gets that kind of service.

We’re living in a new natural and political world order that’s threatening our way of life.

The last thing we need is people, politicians and the corporations that serve us with their heads stuck in the hot sand.