One of our own - Prius saves the planet, one house at a time?

New England has been hammered by a fairly vicious rain/wind storm over the last couple of days. In spite of that, I had been working an event all day and maybe 15 minutes after finally getting in from it and expecting a quiet evening at home catching up, I got this call from a friend. The gist was, "I've been notified that my basement is flooding and the power is out so the sump pump can't run, and I'm still on my two week vacay in ... Scotland." A tree had apparently come down across a bunch of wires up the street, and power had been out for over a day since the power company has been going *nuts* trying to fix the widespread damage from last night.