Topic: 6 hours of blackout seems mild now

[Cobra951]

I was angry last night.  Power went out around 9:30 and didn't return until after 3:30 AM today.  I stepped outside shortly after the sudden darkness.  It wasn't that bad.  The two possibilities for truly severe weather had passed us by much earlier, and now all I could see was some branches swaying and some moderate wind noise.  It was nothing like the wildly animated limbs from Ike in September.  It was then that I started fuming.  How substandard our infrastructure must be to go out because of this.  There would be no power on tropical islands if that's all it took to knock it out.  Well, I guess we were lucky, because once again the area had tens of thousands of outages.  The truly bad winds happened nearby, but not to us.  This time, Duke were prepared, and the power was restored very quickly to most.  Outages went from a peak near 90,000 last night to just over 2100 now.  I owe them an apology, even if I never did insult them out loud.  So this now marks three times since September that the weather has ravaged the area.  We dodged the ice storm outages, but not the other two.

So who else got blasted by this unreal storm that started killing and destroying in Oklahoma?  Idol, are you too far North?  I know Scott was probably hit by this one way or another.

[K-man]

The front moved through here yesterday.  It was moving so fast that it rained very hard for five minutes and then it was gone.  An hour later it was completely out of the state.

Ridiculous.  We had strong winds until well after nightfall. 

[idolminds]

We had some strong winds and rain, but nothing too severe. We lost power for an hour or two the other day, but thats fairly normal for bad weather. Our lines suck.

My aunt was telling me they had freezing rain in northern MN. Glad we didnt get that.

[W7RE]

How substandard our infrastructure must be to go out because of this.

I kept thinking the same thing around here, when we would mysteriously lose power every time it rained. I assumed it was due to the wind that accompanied the rain, and wondered why it was so consistent that we'd lose power EVERY time there was a storm. It had been like this for at least a year it seemed like. Then a worker came out to look and found a long-dead squirrel had been friend on top of our power pole in such a way that he was arcing the current every time the rain got him wet.

[scottws]

That picture is awesome, Cobra.

Our power went out for about 1 minute.  That was it.  Surprising considering our area has to power lines that run from the pole to near the top of each house and there are tons of huge, old trees everywhere.  During the big wind storm, we lost power about 2 hours.

The worst part about yesterday is that I was on call, and my pager was blowing up as our customer's power and Internet was fluctuating on and off.  Happened all the way through 7:30am.