This outage is undoubtably causing 10's of billions of dollars of property damage as we speak (the internet is being flooded with pictures of burst pipes, not to mention rather stark conditions for everyday people that will almost certain result in many deaths in outlier populations).

If the utility company had a disclaimer on their bills, or a billing option to pay more or less depending on if you wanted to run this type of risk - maybe it would be a tradeoff people could make?

Instead this seems to be a complete failure of the regulated utility and it's governing political apparatus resulting in an entirely preventable 'major hurricane' level crisis.