December 2006 Archives

Wishing all of you a happy holiday!

No sooner did I post the last entry then the power returned! Total outage 140 hours and 10 minutes.

Time to get things back to normal!

I think we are close to having our electricity back, there is power now exactly 1 mile from the house, this morning it was around 5 miles away. We drove past a real hard hit area about 2 miles from here, total power grid destruction. There were downed power lines, down poles and the narrow lanes of asphalt (the rest of the roadway was covered by a blanket of limbs and debris).

There was a power crew working on a main trunk and I suspect that is part of our issues of the no power thing.

For us, life is as about as normal as it can be depending on a generator for heat and some electricity. I kind of have down to a routine now, run the "genny" for 5 to 6 hours, and check the oil, top off the tank. During the day I run the heating system real warm. The heat is easy to maintain at that point when Bobbin is home.

I'm tired of stove top food and would love a baked anything at this point - but at the same point it's good to have hot food. Doing the dishes by hand is not fun either, but it's nice to have hot water.

I know I have learned a lot in dealing with this "mini-disaster", had this been a real disaster like an earthquake, we might not have natural gas, which would make things rough. We'd have to stop using the water well (until we retested it) and rely on bottled water and treating water.

I need to learn how to accomplish a few things, 1.) Stock pile gasoline for the generator (or convert to propane). 2.) Figure out how to heat the house with out natural gas. 3.) Build that "emergency kit" those public service commercials talk about.

Well that’s it for now… I am hoping that the next update is when the power has been restored.

without power - and counting.

And even more good news to come...

96 hours and counting - without power. Heard on the news that the nearby sub station suffered a lot of damage and the ETA of power restoration is 1 - 3 days. Today there is around 300k total without power down from 1.5 million.

Thats progress.

Tonight is our first night back as a family in the house as a family. We have water and some heat and some light. Even some TV and internet. The nearest power is about 5 miles away. Outside all you can hear is the drone of generators.

So far so good - update more later

Below are some images from nearby - enjoy

The power have been out for over 62 hours now (went dark at 9:30 pm Thursday). Yesterday morning the my power company indicated that there were 750K households in the dark. This morning the number is down to 300K - progress, but not for me.

We stayed in a hotel last night frankly because is it very cold here now, the low last night was around 25F, the house got down to 50F, so just for a bit of normalcy and comfort we decided that we'd get a room for a couple of nights and hopefully it will A.) warm up a bit, and B.) the power will come back. Both scenarios are welcome right now.

I seem to get 6+ hours on a tank of fuel on the generator (again, THANKS to Rich for parking that here). The sounds of generators fill the area as most of us out here are on wells for our water.

AND as promised here are some images - CLICK HERE

Hi Folks - just an update. We are all OK. No damage to the house. No power. 36 1/2 hours without power and counting.

We lost power around 9:30pm Thursday night, the storm peaked around 1:00AM (Friday morning) and battered us till around 4:00AM. We lost 2 large trees. I estimate that at the peak the winds were around 50 mph sustained with gusts hitting 70 mph.

I was up all night "standing watch". I have to say that I did get very worried at one point about our well being. Hearing large trees snapping (which really sounds like a huge cracking sound) and crashing down (the close ones shook teh ground) all around you is very sobering!

The reports have it at around 1 million household with out power, and it seems to be very slow work to repair the damage. It's hard to describe, but basically there isn't a place where there isn't a tree snapped or blown over. There is a lot of damage to the whole grid, those repair guys are earning thier keep big time.

The power company estimates that we could be out of power for up to a week (YIKES) but we do have a generator and we are hoping to have power restored sooner than that.

I will be posting some images of our area soon as I get my act together - basically we are in "survival mode" and to tell you the truth IT'S A LOT OF WORK!

That's it for now ... will update as we can

Happy Birthday to you!
Happy Birthday Dear Heather

Happy Birthday to you!!

Another year - another joyful picture of my daughter on Santa's knee, telling him all her wishes for Christmas day ....

...Well, maybe next year ;-)

Well there I was with my daughter right after she had awaken from a nice afternoon nap. We were sitting there watching an Elmo DVD when there was a loud "THUD" outside and the power went out. My first thought was that a transformer blew out by the street. So off I went to look (for continuity sake, I handed my daughter off to her mommy).

The first thing I see as I hike down the driveway were my garbage cans knocked over and garbage strewn about, as I get closer there are cars pulling over and low and behold, this car .... It is 1:30pm

And upon yet closer investigation I put the pieces together and figured out that he had just hit the utility pole (and he is lucky to be unhurt). As you can see the pole is broken and it caused the line fuse on the pole to blow, which equals no power.

Well the dark house didn't sit well with the little one so we decided we needed to go out for dinner, and off we went! It is now 4:30pm. The repair crew had just arrived around 6pm as we got back from dinner so we decided to head out to the mall for a bit, let Bobbin play at in the play area, and hang out where there was light. Hit R.E.I to get some lanterns and batteries (this weeks project, an emergency kit for 3 days or survival, I let you know how that goes).

As we got closer to home we wondered if the work was done yet or not as we noticed the bright glow in the sky in the distance, that was the crew at our house. When then got home yet again around 8:30-ish, the crew had our driveway blocked so we parked across the street and "walked in".

I fired up the generator (thanks Rich) and got some light going and get Bobbin ready for bed. I checked the phone and it still worked (yay). Around 10pm I saw a light move down the driveway, so I stepped out to the deck, and it was a workman getting our house un-bypassed and he said, "it would not be long now". So around 10pm the house light up (yay) and I quickly went to work "turning on" the rest of the house and getting the generator offline and headed across the street to get our car.

It took the crew 20 minutes to clear out of the driveway. I finally get back in the house to finish up and check email ... but wait I see that the network is not connecting to the internet ... hmmm .... I pickup the phone and guess what NO DIAL TONE, but it just work a couple of hours ago .... THANK YOU PSE for cutting my phone line and not telling anyone.

I called the phone company as soon as I realized what was wrong, they logged my call and scheduled the soonest repair appointment, they have me all fixed up no later than 5pm Tuesday, you have to be kidding me. I called PSE to speak to a supervisor, none to be found, they don't have any on duty on the weekends, just a crew of telephone operator/dispatchers to take power outage calls. Long story short I was lucky to have the phone company arrive this afternoon and get that fixed by 3:15pm.

PSE, be ready I'm calling your ass tomorrow morning.