Author: admin

From 529,000 yesterday at this time to 311,000 customers aint too shabby.

I understand that by the end of today they expect 85% of the 300k left to have power restored.   The bad part is that will be the bulk of the low hanging fruit though.   (That being affected areas or damage that fixing will restore a larger number of homes/businesses).   The remaining <100k will be smaller individual outages at the residential level.   Our neighbor seems to be one of those as they are still running on a generator from time to time.  Those individual outages will remain through next week (or so I hear).

I think we’ll be looking to upgrade our generator.  I found the integration panel that I never installed and will figure out how to get that baby hooked up.

Yesterday on the way home I was listening to the radio and people were bitching that you couldn’t find a Duke truck with a search warrant.

At that time two very large trucks were working on the transmission lines that run through our property.   We were kind of hoping that once they fixed those we’d have power but that wasn’t the case.

We had beefed up our preparedness though.  On the way home I bought a few more bigger, better extension cords in preparation to move the generator out into the barn so that it could also power the well pump.

I also bought the necessary wire to hook that up too.   Then the need became fuel.   We used to keep fuel on the property, in fact we have a 275 gallon tank for the mowers/tractors, dirt bikes and cars.  But we hadn’t used that in a couple years.

We had called a couple gas suppliers and the only one that answered the phone said he had to deliver to all the municipalities and business he was responsible for first but that he’d call us back at the end of the day to see what he had left.

So I grabbed 3 of our 5 gallon jugs and headed north for fuel.  In Camden, the one gas station was upon and the line was reasonable.  Of course as soon as I started filling them the guy from the fuel company called.  He said we could have the last 70 gallons from his truck if we wanted it.

Well, hell yeah.

So I beat feat for home to pay him for the fuel.   So here we were, on generator power, backups for the grill, and we had water.   What did this mean?  It meant we’d get power that evening, I was sure of it.

On the way to get gas people were calling in on the radio saying that there were caravans of utility trucks heading up I-75.   One person counted 42, another over 200.   That made me feel pretty good that we’d get power back soon.   I know those guys normally slack off, I’ve witnessed that myself on our property when the service the main transmission lines from time to time.  But I know when the @%$#  hits the fan, those guys do get it done, and I’m thankful for that.

So as anticipated at 1am the power came back on.  It took about an hour to unwind all the generator stuff I had previously wound up.   But it was quiet, and that was awesome.

Here’s today’s outage map.  No visual change but the count is down by 60k customers out.