Our View: A New Appreciation For Heat, Light – And Information

If you’re like us, you’ve got a renewed appreciation for lights that come on and furnaces that leave your house toasty warm. You can add hot meals, and particularly hot showers, to the list. Joni Mitchell was right: you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.

 But there was something else that people craved during the Blizzard of ‘26: connectedness. We needed to find out what was happening in our communities, and it simply wasn’t possible for a while. The literal blackout was accompanied by an information blackout.

 Even if you had the foresight to have a battery-powered radio — something absent in many homes today — your choices of information were limited. Very few Cape-based radio stations were operational, and those that were seemed to be mostly playing music. You could pick up pretty reliable storm information from Boston on AM radio, but with very little news pertinent to the Cape. In an age where so many of us rely on the internet for information, a blizzard leaves us high and dry.

 The storm brought down many home internet connections, and those that still functioned were often rendered moot by the lack of electricity to run devices that use them. Many people reported losing internet connections on their phones, cutting off a final avenue for information. Phone calls and text messages were a dicey proposition, too.

 For its part, The Chronicle provided regular web updates throughout the storm, requiring some ingenuity on the part of our editorial staff, for the benefit of readers who were still online. Thanks to a combination of good fortune and some McGyver-like technical improvisation, we were able to lay out last week’s edition during a brief, unexpected time between power outages at the office on Tuesday. We’re extremely proud of our staff’s work in getting the paper out on time. It was a heroic job.

 But we knew that was half the battle: The Chronicle is printed in Seekonk, which was near the epicenter of snowfall during the blizzard. Anticipating that the print edition might be delayed by days, we published our electronic edition on time Wednesday and dropped the paywall so everyone could read it for free during the emergency. But remarkably, the incredible efforts of our printer, TCI Press, meant that the print edition was somehow produced on time, rolling off the presses on Wednesday. 

But even that didn’t finish the job. We’d heard that the post office, which delivers all of our subscribers’ copies, was without power and unable to process bulk mail. Somehow, our postal workers managed to get the papers out to local post offices, where many were delivered Thursday or Friday — about the same time as usual. In all, there was a lot of human effort involved in delivering the Lower Cape’s local news last week. And we’ve heard from so many of you that you appreciated it.

We wanted to save some space this week to express our appreciation to the people who made it happen, from utility workers and our own staff to the good folks at TCI and the post office. 

Thank you.