NYTimes | WHEN the snowstorm hit a week ago Saturday, Evan Sidel was driving home from the supermarket, having stocked up on soup ingredients, thinking she and her two daughters would have a cozy evening in. But while she was unpacking the groceries, the power went out with an audible bang, said Ms. Sidel, who lives in a 100-year-old farmhouse in Wilton, Conn.
“You could literally hear the transformer exploding,” she said.
Then things went south fast, escalating perilously like the plot of an action movie, or “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” in previews. As Ms. Sidel pulled an old land-line telephone out of the closet, one birch tree crashed into the side of her house and another into her front door.
“I called a friend who said, ‘My generator has just kicked in, come on over.’ I got out through the garage, drove over the lawn to the street, and I stayed at my friend’s house until Wednesday,” she recounted. “My girls generator-hopped all over town all week, thrilled to have a different sleepover every night. But another friend of mine has four kids, and she was not so lucky. You can’t generator-hop with a family that size. I have nothing but gratitude for all my generator hosts.”
In another part of town, Christopher Peacock, the high-end kitchen man, was charging a few lights and the refrigerator, along with his family’s computers and cellphones, on a small gasoline-powered manual generator he set out in his driveway, snaking a web of extension cords from the living room.
But Mr. Peacock has well water, and with not enough power for the pump, his family grew not just colder but grubbier as the week progressed. On Wednesday, he; his wife, Jayne; and their 11-year-old son fled to Cape Cod, where they have a summer house.
“School is canceled, so why not?” he said. “It’s like a war zone here. The thing is, I am waiting for, and am in line for, a permanent generator installation. I’ve got one essentially on order, but they’re all back-ordered since Irene. I am definitely feeling some generator envy.”
Mr. Peacock was not alone in this feeling. The back story to the recent biblical weather was the Great Generator Divide. With hundreds of thousands of households without power last week — nearly 800,000 in Connecticut alone — who had a generator (and how big it was) was the second most urgent topic in New Jersey, New York and Connecticut. Generator envy ran wide and deep as the staccato growl and smoky breath of portable generators defined the haves and the have-nots in many neighborhoods.
In Greenwich, Conn., some chilly residents shivered while their neighbors’ mega-units (the whole-house kind that kick on automatically and emit a sound hardly louder than a cat’s purr) powered not just furnaces, washers and dryers, garage doors and electric gates, “but the mood lighting on their trees,” Leslie McElwreath, a broker at Sotheby’s International Realty there, said wonderingly, impressed by her neighbor’s generator prowess (and his spotlighted trees).
Indeed, in a town like Greenwich, where the accouterments of the high-end houses are super-sized, generator power is now a selling point, as home theaters, heated driveways and wine grottos were in years past, said Robert Bland, the brokerage manager of the Sotheby’s office in Greenwich.
“You can’t even open your garage door or your electric gates if you don’t have a generator,” he said. “And with the weather so unpredictable, it’s become a required amenity.”
