I was pretty surprised when I moved to Northern California and had to get used to losing power for 1-2 weeks a year. I thought a set of kerosene lamps the prior owners had left me a cute gift, not realizing they were going to be necessary in non-draught winters.
At first I thought storm related power outages were just a symptom of living in a quasi-rural place with lots of wind and trees, however I'd thought they would have engineered around the problems over the decades. Shortly after a local-ish fire the regional power company showed up and told my neighbors and I something along the lines of "it is time to upgrade you with new poles and attachment hardware, this stuff is 60 years old."
My concern at the time was "don't mess up my view, put it right where the old one was." Not long after that a neighborhood near SFO blew up when aging natural gas pipes let go. I think it was around then that I realized the great public works era build was really the last time California had seen a major investment in this stuff.
I am also fascinated at how slap-dash the water infrastructure is, and yet here were are.
