In this day and age, a few hours without electricity is like a return to the Stone Age. So it might be expected that days worth of outages could leave nerves as frayed as a downed power line. Add to that repeated losses from recurring storms, and you’ve got electric customers pushed to their limit.

“The winters used to be much worse, but even with the big snows, we had nothing like the outages over the past four or five years,” Chappaqua, New York, resident David Kirschstein told the New York Times. “I’m just sick of it.”

A bombardment of storms along the East Coast and other areas has highlighted the difficulty of keeping people in power in the face of today’s extreme weather. It makes little difference to electric users whether it's hurricane force winds, downed trees, or ice-coated lines that shut down the grid. When the lights go off, it spells catastrophe for many.

“Electricity is the most fundamental of utilities. Most everything depends on electric power,” Natural Hazards Center Director Kathleen Tierney told the Christian Science Monitor regarding Saturday’s nor’easter that left about 3 million without power. “These things turn out to be very expensive. People can’t go to work. You have a business interruption situation here.”

Unfortunately, there may not be any simple solution. According to a 2009 Edison Electric Institute report, customers' most common suggestion—burying power lines—is both expensive and inefficacious. Underground lines cost five to ten times more to install, the report states, and many times the protection offered from one hazard is canceled out by another.

“In our area, undergrounding can help protect against wind events, but can actually make us more vulnerable to outages from flooding in some areas,” the report quotes a Houston-area respondent as writing. “Tropical Storm Allison in 2001 would have inflicted more damage on an underground electrical distribution system than on an aerial system.”

That dynamic is sure to leave places like the East Coast in the dark, no matter what measures utilities take to harden infrastructure. And while many are fed up with the constant service interruptions, others, like Sue Gress of New Canaan, Connecticut, are resigned to the new state of affairs.

“It’s global warming,” she told the Times. “No one wants to believe it, but things are changing. There’s much more violent weather, and we’re not prepared to deal with it.”