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Fire pretty but electricity is my friend
Jul. 19th, 2005 11:49 pmUnpleasant day today. At 1pm there was a loud explosion from outside. The transformer JUST down the street blew up. Fire dept. showed up within a very few minutes, spread something white on the street [I heard it was lime?] to retard fires from sparks and they had the fire on the pole out very quickly.
But there was no electricity. I called PG&E to learn that the outage affected 3500 boxes [including my own] and they guesstimated power would be restored by 3pm. I asked to be put on the call-back list for power updates & at 3pm was called & told the NEW guess was the fix would be done around 9pm. Apricot Ave was shut down, 'caution' tape sealing off the street while city workers cleaned up the fire retardant.
At 7pm I went outside and checked with the guys outside & learned that until they had power cleaned the street they couldn't even let the PG&E guys in to fix the transformer because of worries that 'the lime would cause tire damage' and that 'there were PCBs in the fire retardant that had to be properly cleaned up', so there was 7 hours of fiddling around during which the power was not being restored because of this.
No electricity, no coolth - but it 'only' hit 88 degrees today. I made phone calls [land line still worked], rescheduled the writer's group for Thursday when there was no power by 5pm; kept Trey updated on the situation. They let the PG&E guys in at 8pm & the new guess was power by 10pm.
We went out for dinner when Trey got home [at 8:30 because traffic was a mess from the fire on hwy 17 & Camden], met a fellow fan, Jeremy, from across the street who was also outside watching the excitement. We went to the Outback, dined, found out that we had quite a few mutual friends & returned at 9:40 to learn that the power had actually been restored about 10 minutes ago. Hurrah!
Inside, reset everything needing resetting & all is happiness and (electric) light again. But it was definately a listen to the battery-powered radio & read day.
But there was no electricity. I called PG&E to learn that the outage affected 3500 boxes [including my own] and they guesstimated power would be restored by 3pm. I asked to be put on the call-back list for power updates & at 3pm was called & told the NEW guess was the fix would be done around 9pm. Apricot Ave was shut down, 'caution' tape sealing off the street while city workers cleaned up the fire retardant.
At 7pm I went outside and checked with the guys outside & learned that until they had power cleaned the street they couldn't even let the PG&E guys in to fix the transformer because of worries that 'the lime would cause tire damage' and that 'there were PCBs in the fire retardant that had to be properly cleaned up', so there was 7 hours of fiddling around during which the power was not being restored because of this.
No electricity, no coolth - but it 'only' hit 88 degrees today. I made phone calls [land line still worked], rescheduled the writer's group for Thursday when there was no power by 5pm; kept Trey updated on the situation. They let the PG&E guys in at 8pm & the new guess was power by 10pm.
We went out for dinner when Trey got home [at 8:30 because traffic was a mess from the fire on hwy 17 & Camden], met a fellow fan, Jeremy, from across the street who was also outside watching the excitement. We went to the Outback, dined, found out that we had quite a few mutual friends & returned at 9:40 to learn that the power had actually been restored about 10 minutes ago. Hurrah!
Inside, reset everything needing resetting & all is happiness and (electric) light again. But it was definately a listen to the battery-powered radio & read day.
