I live in Texas. We get a "few" thunderstorms. In my ~30 years of being a subscriber I don't ever remember my cell phone service going down as a result of a thunderstorm.
I've had it happen occasionally, but only very occasionally, and not in a long time. Back then, we only had a couple of cell towers out where we lived, in a hilly area, and they didn't have back-up generators at the time. Nowadays, I would be very surprised to find a cell tower that didn't have a generator.
So, that power outage was intermittent? (assuming it was also local)
Well, it depends upon how the place is wired. Around Nashville, it's actually rather common for power to be out on one side of the street and the other side of the street has electricity. This is often strange and annoying if you're the unfortunate one without power, but OTOH, it means that there's a reasonably good chance that some restaurant or store just a couple of blocks away actually has power and is operational. Given that few power outages last more than an hour or two around here, it's really only a minor annoyance either way.
Now, I have no clue how Minneapolis/St. Paul is wired for electricity, so I can hardly say definitively that this is the case for Rock Head, but it's at least a possibility in Nashville.
Of course, none of this addresses the fact that this fool has gone to gripe at DU over a brief inconvenience of losing power from his government-monopoly electric company....
