Yesterday afternoon I was out in the garden when I heard a loud crack; the dogs ran over to the edge of the front yard and started barking and running back and forth. By the time I got over there it was clear that an old dead tree was the source of the noise, and after a few more cracks and pops it finished falling. It took down the wire going to our neighbor’s cabin, and when I went down the driveway to get a better look I found that in the process of pulling down their wire it had broken the power pole off about eight feet up. I called it in, gave KUB enough info to find the pole, and called the rest of our neighbors to let them know why they were without power.
The first guy who came to assess the situation said it looked like it should take a couple of hours, but he said it depended on “whether or not the crew is a bunch of young guys. They like to make things harder than they need to be.”
Within an hour we had a pickup, a boom truck with a new pole on top, and another truck with a cherrypicker. They pulled out the broken pole, cleaned out the hole, dropped in the new pole, restrung the wires, and reset the breaker, restoring our electrical power.
It took between four and five hours, finishing up at about 10:00 pm.
We had turkey burgers and sliced zucchini on the grill and dined by flashlight. Missed an evening of the Olympics and, by the time we talked to our kids, neighbors, etc., just about ran our phones down to zero.
I went out a few times to watch the crew work, and thought about when I was in the work force. With few interruptions, my career was spent with teen struggling with a variety of issues that we mostly chipped away at, measuring our progress in small steps. We never really finished any of those jobs (I’ve joked with my therapist that I’ve had off and on since the church shooting that I’m less screwed up than I used to be, and there’s more truth than humor in that. I’m a work in progress, for certain). That is the opposite of the kind of work that crew was doing. They were presented with a problem, figured out what to do, and, when they were finished, reset the circuit breaker and moved on to the next project.
Power to the people. That’s their job, and a few hours without electricity was a good reminder of just how important their job is.