Power Envy Generates Frustration

Darlene Kilby is shivering. It’s not because she can see her breath as she walks through her house on the 800 block of West Dalton. It’s because she’s mad. Plenty mad.

“It’s a good thing I’m not a violent person,” she said, taking a long drag on her cigarette. “I’m ready to take hostages.”

The envious Kilby, her husband and her 5-year-old nephew have been living without power for five days. She hates hearing about people who’ve had electricity through the whole ordeal.

Throughout Spokane, neighborhoods, families and friends have drawn dividing lines - those with power and those without.

It’s hell, Kilby said, to live a block away from people who have heat and electricity while she’s still suffering.

One toasty-warm person is Kilby’s dear, sweet sister, Cheryl Hannah. “It’s sickening,” Kilby said, sending a daggered look toward her sister. “It’s warmer outside than in my home.”

“It just makes me so sad,” said Hannah, who never lost power. “You feel so guilty. I saw a WWP truck turning near my sister’s house and I got tears in my eyes. I was like, ‘Go to my sister’s house, please.”’

Hannah has offered her sister the use of her warm apartment on Euclid.

“At least come over to stop shivering, for gosh sakes,” Hannah said.

But Kilby refused. She’s determined to sleep in her bed, no matter how cold she gets, no matter how many days it takes to get power back.

“I’m not leaving my house for nothing,” she said. “There ain’t no place like home.”

, DataTimes