Michael,
A bright side to all this is people writing and talking to each other. Thank you for your words. Our neighborhood had only one person with a generator, everyone else left, and there is still no power. Our house is in the middle of a farm and our power feed comes from a separate feed, and we did not lose power. Following Irene, the woods had gotten a good pruning, but never in my life have I seen this kind of damage to vegetation and in particular trees. The forests are a mess. My buddy in Sharon, CT got 24 inches at their farm. It is eerie to see so much green and full leafed trees, still. The crews we have seen are from Oaklahoma (get it?). I agree, we are headed for a utility bail out; once again corporate America is above the laws of nature.
Best,
Leland
Leland Torrence Enterprises and The Guild
Conservation - Restoration - Management
17 Vernon Court, Woodbridge, CT 06525
Office 203-397-8505 Fax 203-389-7516
Mobile 203-981-4004
e-mail [log in to unmask]
www.LelandTorrenceEnterprises.com
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-----Original Message-----
From: The listserv where the buildings do the talking [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Michael Edison
Sent: Sunday, November 06, 2011 8:19 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [BP] Lights Out
Michael P. Edison
President
Edison Coatings, Inc.
3 Northwest Drive
Plainville, CT 06062
(860) 747-2220 x204
c. (860) 508-0900
[log in to unmask]
www.edisoncoatings.com
Edison Coatings <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>Power was restored at 10:44 PM last night, 7 days 6 hours and 20 or so minutes after going down in a freak snowstorm. October 29th snow wasn’t the freak part – we have seen that before, though not often. Trees still full of leaves on October 29th, combined with wet heavy snow, was the freak event. The leaves are usually a week past peak color and largely down by then, a good gust of wind all that stands between those still up and those already down. Today, November 6th, there are many still up and still green.
>
>Power often goes down for an hour or two during storms. Much of Connecticut is a settled forest, and these things happen. But in a neighborhood with underground utilities, we are generally back up quickly. The night of the storm we sat in candlelight, listening to hour after hour of the forest being torn apart, an endless chorus of cracks and crashes. By morning, as I sawed my way out of my driveway, the extent of the damage was clear, and we knew this would take a while. Within a mile of my house there were perhaps as many as 1000 trees that came down on power lines, and that translates to 100,000 (using the area equation of pi d squared over 4; 100 times that number) within ten miles, the distance from home to our shop. We never dreamed it would be 5 days before we saw our first utility truck.
>
>As the temperatures dropped, both inside and outside, the games began. One supermarket was open and working on generator power, and pallets of overpriced firewood disappeared in an instant. We soon found that not only were power lines down, but phone lines as well. We had always been able to depend on those old land lines in the past, the main reason for keeping them. Cell phone service was spotty, but we found a spot with good reception a couple of miles from the house and were able to reach the contractor who periodically trims our trees. He doesn’t sell firewood, but welcomed us to come up and take what we needed from his woodpile, an act of incredible generosity. He refused payment, even though he was risking eventually running out of his primary home heating fuel by sharing it. I filled the SUV with his help, unknowingly picking up a tick along with the wood. It later drowned at the bottom of a bottle of what had been fine small batch bourbon, my wife having skillfully extracted it from my back.
>
>I have lived in my current house for 11 years. This week I discovered that our fireplaces were well designed and in good working order, having used them for the first time.
>
>Leya, I and our Weinmaraner Jake moved into the family room next to the kitchen, where we worked to maintain livable temperatures for the next week. Meanwhile, our refrigerator was warming up, and we replaced it with a pile of snow behind the house, at first. Later, our enclosed back porch did the job. We were grateful for having switched our kitchen stove to propane, several years ago. Neighbors came and went over the next few days, our house being the closest source of hot food and coffee. They slowly disappeared, though, abandoning the neighborhood for places north and south of us where there was heat, light, comfort and relief for and from cranky kids. Halloween was cancelled. By the end of the week, we were living in a ghost town.
>
>Just a few weeks ago I was in Victoria, BC, at the APT Conference. One picks up many useful things at APT, but I never dreamed that the most immediately useful acquisition would be a pocket flashlight, a give-away from the Christman Company. I attached it to my keychain and didn’t think anything of it again, until fumbling in the dark to connect cables from a small gas generator I picked up on Tuesday. I must have used it a hundred times this week.
>
>On Tuesday morning, power came up on US Rt 44, a couple of miles away. I made my way through downed trees and wires to get out and search for survival supplies, and found the Whole Donut shop open and serving hot coffee and fresh donuts. The line was literally out the door as one 75-ish woman worked as hard as she could to serve the cold, grumpy crowd. A young woman at the end of the line said “Marion, can I help you? I can at least pour coffee for you.” The elderly woman disappeared for a moment into the back room. “The boss said NO,” she told us, when she returned. The crowd grew grumpier and more vocal about it. Eventually the boss came forward and decided he would have to help out himself. “Didn’t you make any Decaf?” he barked at the old woman. Customers let into him, meanwhile filling Marion’s bag with $5 tips.
>
>I had an old gas generator, used to power a pair of electric demolition hammers decades ago when we had crews doing concrete repair work. Unsurprisingly, I couldn’t get it to start. But after seeking a new one in vain, I found a repair shop that wasn’t buried with 200 broken chainsaws to fix, willing to take mine in and to sell me an old repaired one. All sales CASH ONLY of course. There was no power, phone lines or internet service to run credit cards. I was glad I had visited the ATM just before the storm. By week’s end, the disaster profiteers showed up in town, hauling trailer-loads of generators, setting up hand written signs offering them at $999. Cash Only, of course.
>
>Early in the week there were 1973-style gas lines. People lined up for hours, running on fumes, waiting to fuel up in the few stations that had both gas and the power to pump it. One station had a single 2-gallon gas can left for sale, and along with the one I already had, it became the focus of twice-a-day refill runs, allowing the old generator to keep going. We managed to keep our family room log cabin at 57 degrees with a couple of electric heaters. Opening the family room door to cross the hallway to our frigid in-house outhouse was a step back in time. I was appreciative of our connection to public water though, which maintained its pressure and flow throughout the week.
>
>I didn’t see my first repair crew until Friday morning, six days after the storm. It was a small army, a fleet of a dozen or more Electrical Contractor’s trucks from Missouri. In one day, they seemed to clear more downed trees and right more power lines than I would have imagined anyone could have dealt with in a week. Power was now within a mile of home. On my second gas run of the day, on Saturday evening, there were suddenly four of those trucks right around the corner.
>
>Four hours later, as we faced yet another depressing night of indoor camping, the house suddenly sprung back to life. Lights came on, the furnace fired up and the flat screen TV illuminated. It was HBO! And just like that, it seemed like everything was back to normal, the past week seeming like a bad dream.
>
>On the radio, Connecticut’s Attorney General was talking about the failures of our local utility company, and their announced intentions to have rate-payers, not stockholders, pay for the storm damage. It had been argued all week that Connecticut Light and Power had gutted tree-trimming budgets and had reduced line crew staffing to less than 15% of historic levels to increase corporate profits. The AG vowed to fight attempts to make the victims pay, citing that storm damages were figured into the rates the utility company was allowed to charge. At the same time, he said, we have to accept that global warming is now a reality, and we have experienced and will continue to experience weather of increasing severity. We are all going to have to adjust our plans accordingly.
>
>Edison Coatings, Inc.
>Michael P. Edison
>President
>3 Northwest Drive
>Plainville, CT 06062
>Phone: (860) 747-2220 or (800)341-6621
>Fax: (860)747-2280
>Internet: www.edisoncoatings.com
> www.rosendalecement.net
>E-Mail: [log in to unmask]
>
>
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