To the editor:

We are a country much admired in the world for our great technical achievements and the conquest of outer space. However, the world may not know how helpless we can be when deprived of electric power by an ice storm.

We can, of course, manage without electric light, the TV or the refrigerator (in winter!). We can use candles for light. What is much worse is the lack of heat, as happened to us recently when we had to endure 36 hours at house temperatures down to about 40-46 F. We didn’t feel warm even under a stack of comforters.

One can wonder why gas heating depends entirely on an electric switch, which depends in turn, on the power grid. Hasn’t anyone invented a way of switching on a gas furnace by using a battery? Switching to another cheap source of power should not pose a technically complex problem.

I believe that those of us who shivered at home in early January — as well as those who sympathized but could fall victim to the next ice storm — should all put pressure on the people who provide us with gas heating to find a technical solution to this problem.

I would be glad to liberate the inventor of an alternative power source to switch on gas furnaces — from any obligation to share his/her profits with me!

Roma Boniecka,

Lawrence