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Saturday, May 15, 2010
Power Outage!
Our power went out Sunday night.
We were cleaning up the apartment, rearranging furniture, doing dishes, etc. We had just started the dishwasher and were wrapping up the cleaning we were going to do. I opened the fridge to put my leftovers back in, and poof. Pure darkness. Lots of quiet. I thought maybe we’d blown a fuse because my desk lamp was on in the computer room, but that wasn’t so. It was the only light on, and as it turns out, it was plugged into my UPS so was still being powered. Whoops. So no power. The whole building was down. Once we located flashlights, we found out that not only was the building down, but it looked like the whole street was out, too! The two big cross-streets were dark.
It turns out that pretty much everything that we want to do requires power or at least light. I’ve gotta say, it doesn’t sound fun to try to play Scrabble or Monopoly with flashlights. Reading a book would be fine for me, but Johnathan’s not much of a reader, so what would he do? Impasse. Naturally, our next solution was to go for a walk! Well, it wasn’t the next thing we thought of, but it was too eerily quiet to do anything that the neighbors might potentially hear. I mean, there was no ambient noise at all except for the cars on the nearby streets and the apartment tenants chatting to each other, postulating what might have happened to cause the outage. No dice there. So we went for a walk.
Despite it being May, it’s been really chilly lately, with our highs back down to the low 50′s Fahrenheit. We donned our coats and I put on my lovely Signe hat and a-walking we went. I took the Maglight that my dad gave to me about ten years ago. It’s a nice long one. I had a weapon in case someone got a little too pushy or something on our usually-pretty-safe-looking street. It was strange how dark everything was when we were walking up to the street. We could see who was still awake and making due with whatever they had that didn’t require electricity to light up and who had just given up and gone to bed already.
When we got up to the intersection near our apartment, we decided it would probably be best not to try to cross the four-lane street. People were having a really hard time with the concept of the ‘four-way stop’, since the stoplight was out. So we turned right and proceeded down the street. About a quarter mile down the street, we met a man who was just standing watching the traffic. He was able to tell us the scope of things as far as he had heard from others. Down the street into the next town, there was no power, and in the other direction, there were people without power a few miles down the road. But the street up past the highway, reportedly, had power. Interesting! We still, of course, hadn’t heard what happened, so we kept walking. I’m not sure where we thought we were going – we just kept walking, using our flashlights to check down the little alleys to ensure we weren’t going to die unexpectedly because someone decided that was the best time to clobber a random pedestrian.
We got up to a little storage facility a couple miles down the road (I’ll never be able to think of one of those without shuddering after seeing Storage at the film festival) and decided to turn around. It was late, we’d been cleaning for a few hours and I was getting pretty tired. As we walked back, I reflected on the way the area seemed to change with the power out. There was a feeling of lawlessness as nobody obeyed traffic laws and the only stoplight that I saw where people used the four-way stop behavior was the one right near our apartment, which is generally pretty busy anyway. The rest? Well, people just blew right through them. I’m surprised we didn’t witness a car accident. Everyone was suspicious, more so than they would have been in daylight or even if the power had been working. It was interesting to see that none of the businesses had generators, and few even seemed to have emergency lights. So, it was an interesting walk!
We got back to the apartment, and I was really tired. We took care of our evening ablutions and got into bed. I was just starting to drift off to sleep when a light in our computer room came on. Power was back. It had gone out for about an hour and a half in total, and we’d done a pretty darn good job of getting everything turned off. Johnathan sweetly retrieved my cell phone from his car, where we had stashed it to charge for a while since it was almost dead when the power went out, and then we both collapsed and went to sleep.
The next day, I decided to look up what happened. I found an article that reported that First Energy had a piece of equipment fail on Sunday night which took out power in our city and a few of the ones surrounding. They estimate that over 10,000 homes were without power on Sunday night. Big deal! Not like the multi-state outage of 2003 that I was told about several times. (“Don’t you remember?!” people kept asking. No! I was in Oregon! And heck, I don’t remember any major Oregon weather things from then, either. I turned 18 that year. I probably didn’t care.) But it was a pretty big deal for us and people in our area. I’m glad power came back on, because we were charging Johnathan’s cell phone with his netbook and praying we’d both wake up to his alarm when it went off. I’d hate to call in and tell my boss I’d be late because we lost power the night before!
All in all, it made a pretty exciting end to the weekend. I suspect that Johnathan and I revel in disaster situations when clearly nobody’s hurt because of it and we’re not having to work to correct it. They’re pretty exciting in those circumstances!
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