/rant on.
Basically, we got from a quarter to a half an inch of ice on all exposed surface.There were many, many downed trees as a result. Some of them were as big around as my torso.Unfortunately, the run of mild winters had lead the local power company to skimp on trimming branches/trees encroaching over the power lines.
The results were massive outages, in the numbers of hundreds of thousands.
In my case, my neighbors shitty silver maple lost a main limb that proceeded to rip the mast, mater and line off his house AND mine in one go.So the power company had to come out... and cut the line as it was still live.
What followed was desperately trying to get someone out to replace the mast and meter before we could even get hooked back up.The power company provided the replacement meter, but the electricians were booked solid for 4 days within hours of the storm, and wanted 800$ to put us at the end of the list.
Ended up paying a guy we knew knew what he was doing ( was used to working 440+ lines as part of wiring production lines) but didnt have a current license, and do the work under a home owners permit.
We were actually one of the fortunate ones. Some of the people in the city proper were like 9-10 days without. That was a different power company. *Those* idiots managed to screw up to the point where they blew through their supply of ready spare transformers by bringing up a section of town that still had a massive short. So they basically had to wait another *week* to truck more in from out of state.
Then they managed to screw up getting things back together by doing such asinine things as parceling out all the volunteers from out of state to only pad their existing crews , and thus got no benefit. Then they got nailed for letting employees and friends slip up the priority list instead of optimizing it for getting EVERYONE up the quickest.
Yeah. Those guys are STILL facing touch questions from the media and local politicians.
/rant off.
Basically, we got from a quarter to a half an inch of ice on all exposed surface.There were many, many downed trees as a result. Some of them were as big around as my torso.Unfortunately, the run of mild winters had lead the local power company to skimp on trimming branches/trees encroaching over the power lines.
The results were massive outages, in the numbers of hundreds of thousands.
In my case, my neighbors shitty silver maple lost a main limb that proceeded to rip the mast, mater and line off his house AND mine in one go.So the power company had to come out... and cut the line as it was still live.
What followed was desperately trying to get someone out to replace the mast and meter before we could even get hooked back up.The power company provided the replacement meter, but the electricians were booked solid for 4 days within hours of the storm, and wanted 800$ to put us at the end of the list.
Ended up paying a guy we knew knew what he was doing ( was used to working 440+ lines as part of wiring production lines) but didnt have a current license, and do the work under a home owners permit.
We were actually one of the fortunate ones. Some of the people in the city proper were like 9-10 days without. That was a different power company. *Those* idiots managed to screw up to the point where they blew through their supply of ready spare transformers by bringing up a section of town that still had a massive short. So they basically had to wait another *week* to truck more in from out of state.
Then they managed to screw up getting things back together by doing such asinine things as parceling out all the volunteers from out of state to only pad their existing crews , and thus got no benefit. Then they got nailed for letting employees and friends slip up the priority list instead of optimizing it for getting EVERYONE up the quickest.
Yeah. Those guys are STILL facing touch questions from the media and local politicians.
/rant off.