Sunday, November 06, 2011

Back on the Grid

Woodbury, Connecticut

detail



At three-fifteen this afternoon, a Storm Response Team from southern Alabama (sixty miles from the Florida line according to the crew chief) "heated up" the circuit that feeds two buildings on our place and one across the road, all left out of last Thursday's power restoration because the transformer for these services blew. The crew thought that work was proceeding much too slowly because of stupid management of the situation. They didn't have transformers on their THREE! trucks, because they weren't being distributed at the day's start point. They stood around, frustrated, for an hour after removing the bad "pot" before they were given the go-ahead to fix something the hell else while waiting for a new pot to be delivered here. Hours later, they were back, because the pot was supposed to be here. It wasn't, for another half an hour. Then they finally got to install the thing, and the meters on all three buildings went green with aplomb. 191 hours in October/November without power, well, seriously sucks.

11 comments:

Martina said...

:-) I am really really really glad to read this.

And ...

welcome back to the Grid!

Markus Spring said...

Carl, good to read this. Even American pioneer spirit gets used up after a week in the cold.

Stephen said...

Break out the naturally-cooled champagne!

Ed said...

That's good news. Glad all is well. But you're right... way too long to be without power in this day and age.

Scott Kirkpatrick said...

Glad to see you're back. Do they have drive-in theaters that you should visit someday in southern Alabama?

scott

John Sarsgard said...

Welcome back to civilization! There are obviously serious problems with how this stuff is being managed in Connecticut. I hope the governor stays mad once it's all over.

James Weekes said...

Welcome back to the land of the warm. I've missed your posts. My best friend lives on Rte. 7 in W. Cornwall and is still out of touch. Luckily he has good wood heat and a small generator. We were furnaceless for 3 days on the coldest days of last winter when it was about 30f here in North Florida, where houses are built to shed heat not retain it. After one day it was just a slog. I hope things have returned to normal.

Now, go out and shoot!

Carl Weese said...

The crew was really frustrated. They thought they were only fixing about half as many problems as they would have "the way we do it back home." The news says that fifty thousand CL&P customers are *still* without power today.

Scott, I've shot at a number of DI theaters in northern AL, but there are only a few at the far south. Except for Florida, the deep south has few DI theaters. I don't know if it's the hot summer weather, or mosquitoes, or what, but it's really striking when you look at the Google Earth DI theater map.

Carl Weese said...

Here's an interesting take on the situation:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/business/the-troubling-connecticut-power-failure.html

Taken For Granted said...

Welcome back to the 20-21st century, complete with heat, light, and Internet. Sounds like some political fallout could be in the winds from that storm.

Ryan said...

Glad the power came back finally. That's way too long to be without.