"Be Prepared."

It's the Boy Scout motto.

It's also what we tell ourselves as wild winter weather approaches. Local television stations compete with one another to be known as the storm center for their region: the greatest, most up-to-the-minute source of information, weather watches, emergency reports, and eye-in-the-sky overviews.

The only problem with all this preparedness, with all this reliance upon emergency broadcast systems, is that once an ice storm, flood, hurricane or windstorm hits with its inevitable power outage, we're out of the broadcast loop.

It's completely predictable. Those in the middle of the worst weather, those with the most critical need to know, are those the information can't reach. Yet whenever the power really does go out we continue to be surprised at the …