(no subject)

[the_rck]

Because life wasn't complicated enough...

We now don't have electricity. DTE says three more hours to get it back. I need to call the plumber to find out if they can work without electricity.

I heard a bang right before the power went which usually means a neighborhood outage, so I'm hoping more people report it so that it gets moved up the list of priorities. If nothing else, I want my shoulder heating pad.

ETA: Ten minutes after I posted, power came back. DTE says it was 'bird or animal damage to DTE equipment,' and it does appear to have been neighborhood wide.

I'm still glad I had ordered lunch delivered before things went out. Eating that filled the time that I would otherwise have spent worrying.

Comments

[lady_of_mists]

That's really quick to get the power back! Maybe the employee was right on the scene when it happened (or someone noticed what happened and was able to tell them before they got there).

[the_rck]

In my report, I told them that I heard a bang a fraction of a second before the power went. I thought that might make them look at the transformers first. The outage map showed a dot of outages with the center in between two streets. Either a lot of people reported, or enough of us mentioned the sound to help pinpoint it.

A transformer going sounds like a firecracker. The more central ones are louder when they go. The last few years, those have been the main culprit for power loss in our neighborhood.

[telophase]

At my mom's old place out in the country, we used to have frequent outages due to suicidal squirrels touching the transformer. Eventually the power company put a cage over it and they stopped.

(I remember Mom telling me that one days as she drove home she saw the neighbors all standing out in their front yard. She got home and there was no power. She called them, asking if they were standing outside because they had no power, and they said "No, we're standing outside because our dog found a dead squirrel." That one was quite easy to figure out. XD)

[the_rck]

Did the squirrels chew on the lines, too? We get that sometimes (more often when we had a landline than now), and my mother says that, in Baton Rouge, they sometimes lose power because of rats chewing the lines.

[telophase]

I have no idea if they did or not!

We'd often lose water because fire ants would get into the pump for the well. The solution for that was to go out and bang on the pump with a ball peen hammer.