After hurricane Isabel, when over 4 million customers were without power, the background noise on MF and HF were absolute zero here. One of my long-wire angtennas knocked out of a tree had better performance lying on the ground thatn it ever had (pre-storm) when it was 70' in the air.
If you notice a big difference when only your own home (or a neighborhood-sized outage occurs), you have noise issues that might be manageable with a different style of antenna, better grounding, and the addition of ferrite/toroidal chokes on your power and data cabling. Some power utilities have great records of assisting cutomers in isolating problems with the utility's transmission lines, and some could care less. It's their loss when noisy lines are leaking a lot of energy and it can't hurt to raise the issue with your local provider if you suspect that is a cause. Just clean up your own noise first ;-)
R/
Jack
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