Is this a first? A violation of the Postal Code?

"The U.S. Postal Service has canceled mail delivery in the city of Duluth on Friday, according to Pete Nowacki, a U.S. Postal Service spokesman.

The Postal Service's main office in West Duluth lost power at about 3 a.m. Thursday, disrupting processing operations. Nowacki said the Postal Service takes its duties seriously, but weather conditions in Duluth warrant respect."

Herodotus in the 5th century BC wrote:

"It is said that as many days as there are in the whole journey, so many are the men and horses that stand along the road, each horse and man at the interval of a day’s journey; and these are stayed neither by snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness from accomplishing their appointed course with all speed."

...which was then adapted for the New York City central post office building in 1912...

"Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds."

This isn't the official motto or code of the postal service, but just an inscription on one building.

Still, pretty catchy. It is obviously a compelling sentiment. According to Tolkien postal workers in the Shire were honored above soldiers for their tireless service to the community.

Errr: "Great Lakes Aquarium is closed Friday. GLA will likely be open on Saturday."

Technology inadvertently creates singular points of failure?

FWIW, there are a lot of businesses that had no such problem. As an engineer, I admire the fact that the paper mill has it's own source of power.

As a postal worker, I'll tell you that when the power goes out at 3am, it's absolutely impossible for the carriers to deliver the next day. Every night, we put about 250,000 letters into walk-sequence for Duluth alone (the actual sequence that each carrier walks on his/her route). We do the same thing for the range, the north shore, Superior, and all of northern Minnesota. That can't be done by hand like it was in the past without the enormous staff we had in the old days.

Also, the Postal Code is antiquated, asinine, and dangerous. There is no reason for people to risk their lives so that your Cub Foods coupons aren't delayed one day.

I feel the need to point out I was not knocking the post office nor do I think they should deliver in dangerous weather. I just wondered if it was a first.

So is the mail actually put into sequence by hand? Or is it done by a machine? How does the machine know where each carrier walks? And how do those rural postal carriers drive the car from the passenger side?!?

I did not miss getting mail.
I did enjoy watching the kids, catching snowflakes on their tongues,creating snow-devils and rapidly melting snow folk, being excited about one more time shoveling, and a huge nagging session to drag out the snow blower.
..........If the kids aren't complaing-Mama & Dada are happy.

I could have done without the power outage, but I was pleasantly surprised that it abruptly came back on at our house by mid-afternoon on Friday.[1] By that time, we'd had the neighbors over to cook hotdogs in the fireplace, and I'd just managed to find and light the Coleman stove to finally make coffee.

[1] I'm not really rubbing it in for any of you who were out longer, as I feel your pain--I'm pretty much a one-man rolling blackout, having endured two week-long outages and numerous smaller ones over the years.]