Fifteen Hours Without Power

Tuesday morning I took off for the second of a four day RADAR certification class. Myself and two others headed down knowing that our area was expecting a pretty big snow storm that was supposed to start that afternoon.  While we were at a much lower elevation and almost an hour away, all it did was rain. My wife though, updated me on the snow situation.  It started long before we were done for the day. 
By the time we finished training that afternoon,  and climbed back to out mountain town, several inches covered the ground.  I settled in for dinner and watched the snow come down with the family.
Then, at around 6:30…..we were plunged into darkness. Complete blackout.
We quickly gathered candles and lit the house. I shambled out to the road to make a cellphone call to the power company, texted one of my training partners, and shut down the cell to save the nearly dead battery. 
The biggest problem with no power…was no heat. And we were buried in snow so we couldn’t go anywhere either. I dragged the futon mattress into the living room, and with a blanket, sealed off the hallway and bedrooms to keep any remaining heat from being dissipated by the drafty portions of our aged home.
Then I headed out to shovel out the driveway. 
Somewhere around 8, I see a glow in the sky down the road. It flickered through the trees, and I hoped it was the power company.  But something was amiss…the flickering was random, and familiar. It was a fire. I headed out in the storm to investigate,  and found a power line had been torn from a pole by a fallen pine bough, weighted down by the heavy, wet snow. The line sputtered, popped, and buzzed in the middle of the road, throwing sparks, flame, and steam as it rapidly melted the snow around it. My fire scanner indicated that the fire department was on its way, so I went back and shoveled some more.
Somehow, my wife managed to put the boys to sleep in the living room amid a pile of blankets and pillows. Outside, the only light I had was an eerie orange glow to the south east, the lights from the nearby ski mountain as they happily blew snow onto the slopes.

I dont remember what time I came back inside, but around 11:30, the power flashed back on, but lasted only a few moments before blacking out again. About that time, a truck from the power company went up the road. I dressed and went out again to shovel more, and to hail the truck and see what was happening.
About now, I realized that the pine trees were reaching their capacity to hold snow. The stillness of the night was interrupted periodically with the sounds of large branches breaking under the strain. The power truck came back down, and the driver told me they were still working on it. I went back inside and dozed off.

Something woke me at 4am. The plow maybe. There was a new orange, flickering glow through the trees to the north. A second power line down on a tree, burning. I slipped outside and started the car, hooking my phone to it to charge as I shoveled. For laughs, I called the power company’s automated line to check the estimated time of restoration,  and was shocked to hear the recording tell me that there were no service interruptions in the area, that power had been restored at 11:30PM. I followed the prompts to report a new outage.
I was astonished a few moments later to get a phone call BACK from them, just so they could tell me “no, we fixed that.”
I informed them that we were still out. I told them I had checked my breakers. Oddly, the house next door to us had power. I also told them that I had two little kids who had been without heat for going on 10 hours.
The power company then told me “well, nobody else has reported it.”
To which I mentioned that on a dead end road with 7 houses on it, we were the only full time residents,  and I would have been amazed if anyone else HAD called them.
I was told they would send someone to look at it.

At this point, I begin to think of new plans for the day. This third day, Wednesday,  was the practical portion of my training course. If I wanted to certify, I HAD to go. I finished digging out the car, went back inside, and began to pack gear, and make plans for my wife and boys to go to my parent’s place.
Amazingly, my wife rejected the idea when she woke up, and we were still fighting about it when my ride came to pick me up at 7am.

On the road,  and fuming that my wife had opted to stay in a house that now required sweatshirts and blankets to stay warm, rather than evacuate, I texted the day shift worker to drop in on them and see how they were doing while I was out. I also called the power company again. The automated voice said there was a known outage effecting two people. Estimated repair time….9:30am.

Somewhere around 9, the messages rolled in from the fort. Power restored.  A 15 hour stretch with no lights, heat, hot water, or even radio (dead batteries) in the middle of a major winter storm was over.

A look up our road.

My wife gutted out a frozen home with two feisty, anxious little boys, and I went to training on only snippets of sleep, to be fueled constantly by coffee throughout the day. Even as I write this, three days later, we are exhausted. My schedule hasn’t stopped since then. My wife sleeps on the couch as I work the mobile app to write this. There is a small break tomorrow,  I dont report for more training until Monday, so I hope to get up early with the boys and let the Mrs. Sleep a bit. She’s earned it.

“Literally.”

The power cut out last night around 8:30 thanks to a major storm that rolled through the area. I was extremely thankful that I wasn’t working a night shift because as soon as the night lights and white noise machines died, both boys woke up. The Narrator was afraid, and Mini-Me knew something was amiss so it took me two hours to put him back to sleep. The battery powered radio told us that the power company expected the wide-spread outage to be resolved by 1:30am.

Somewhere before then, the wife and I decided to go to bed rather than sleep on the couches in the living room, as is the usual procedure for sleeping arrangements during a power outage. Of the six houses on the dead road on which we live, we are the only full time residents. So when we switched off the flashlights in the bedroom, without the red glow of the alarm clocks or the pale illumination of the baby monitor, it got DARK. Like- “Are my eyes open or closed?” sort of dark. By this time, we were exhausted, so we went to sleep.

At one point I woke up, and could feel in my bones that it was well past 1:30, and there was still no juice. I snuck out of the bedroom and past the boys’ rooms to find my cell phone and check the time. 4am.

Interesting.

So I burgled in reverse and left the house as silently as possible to go stand in the middle of the road where we have 3G service, and check the power company’s web site. New prospective time for power to come back was 4:45am.

Well, now I’m awake, so I lit a “Fresh Brewed Coffee” scented candle from Kittredge Candles, and started to read a book.  (I have no affiliation with Kittredge, but my wife has purchased from them a few times, and I am a massive fan.) Immediately after I settled down, Mini-Me stirred, so I went in and spent the rest of the wee hours of the morning with him, waiting for sunrise, or the power to come back- whichever came first. As I like to plan, I began to come up with contingencies for the morning in case there was no electricity when we all got up. Luckily, the juice came back on right around 5:30, and everything was okay again.

The Narrator woke up as I was getting ready to go to work. I sipped my coffee quickly and listened to one of his imagination-driven stories. I don’t remember exactly what it was he said that prompted me to say “Oh little buddy. you’re some piece of work. Don’t ever change a thing.” A moment later, my wife started laughing. I looked up from what I was doing.

He had literally changed ONE THING. He switched the locations of two items on the floor, and was laughing like a loon trying to get me to guess what it was that he’d did. He of course gave me ‘hints’ which were little more than sound effects related to whatever items he had moved. I finally figured it out, and he collapsed laughing, while I marveled at how much like his mother he was when it comes to taking things to literally.

Of course- as anyone with a five year old knows, this was not the end of the activity. Once I laughed, he caught the scent of blood in the water, and now it became a full-on game. He switched two more objects, and begged me to figure out what they were again. I did, and tried desperately to gather my kit for work at the same time.

Mommy, sensing my exasperation right about the time ‘Round Nine’ of the game commenced, asked him to “Do it once more, and then we’ll move on and have breakfast.” In typical five-year-old fashion, he continued on for several rounds, up to the point where he stole one of my shoes and switched it with his little brother’s milk cup….AS I WAS PUTTING THEM ON.

The entire time, he’s laughing maniacally- which turned immediately into wailing and tears as soon as we kindly asked him once more to put the game to bed. “BUT IT WAS SOOOOOOO FUUUUUN!!!”

– Now, before you try to chastise me for not wanting to play a simple little game with my son, I’ll remind you that small children, especially little boys- have no concept of ‘enough.’ I did indulge his game for a time, but as with many activities initiated by youngsters, the continuation of it became difficult, to the point of impeding conversation between my wife and I as he constantly interjected his guffaw into our conversation with screeches of “DADDY! GUESS WHAT’S DIFFERENT!”

It became time to hit the off switch, and he was not happy about it. Eventually, I had to pin him to the floor and tickle him until he stopped being such a sad sack. That worked until I kissed him goodbye, and he melted into a puddle of “I’ll miss daddy” goo.

Such is parenting.