Thursday 5 March 2015

Where has all the power gone?

hydro website

Hubby woke me at 2:30 a.m. to tell me we had no power.

At 4:30 I got up, fed worried cats, found a candle, stoked the fire. It's amazing how much we need hydro in the boonies.

No water, heat, toilet, lights, coffee and limited phones  - only 2 phones don't require power. I had to manually raise the garage door. Couldn't start the snow blower, as I'm not strong enough to pull the start cord. It has an electric starter, which is far more convenient.

Phoned hydro, on their 800-hotline, 15,556 customers out, power to be restored by 10:00 a.m., not so bad. Back to bed. Daisy went out when I restoked the fire, she was back at the door for 5:30 a.m. Up again at 8:00, I phoned Hydro again, and their bizarre 'Emily' voice told me I'd already phoned at 4:44 and nothing had changed. It was peculiar.


I phoned my son-in-law, who assured me it was relatively local, except there were people out in Toronto, some out in Kingston. He looked it up on the hydro website for me.

Thanks to the solar powered/wind-up radio our SIL gave us, we found out that power was to be returned by 12:00 noon, which was a little later, but not so bad. Then, they said 1:00 p.m., then 1:15. At least they were pinning it down somewhat. They explained that a hydro pole had caught on fire, at Highway #29 and Golf Club Rd., outside Smiths Falls, and this had to be replaced.

Later, on the news, I heard it was from the salt that evaporates and gets into the housing for the hydro poles.
Worried Mourning doves.
The bird bath was frozen over.
No power, no heater!

I shoveled the walk, hubby fetched the paper, which we read, now what? There were fire trucks down the road, but nothing too bad.

Thank goodness for our volunteer firefighters.
 

I had a leftover pizza slice for brekkie. Hubs had a muffin or two. We continue to mourn our Sady, and I just wanted a 'normal' day, but it wasn't to be.

Too bad it ran out of propane
after the coffee was done!
At least it was a nice day.


My mother's fabulous percolator!
I cancelled my appointments for the day, and decided to shovel the back deck and get the BBQ going.  JB said that the minute I did that, the power would come back on – so go ahead!

I brewed the coffee, it ran out of propane just as it was nearly brewed. That was good.

Miracle of miracles, bless their hearts, the power was back on at
11:34. Hip, hip, hooray!

5 comments:

Christine said...

we had power outages in Toronto yesterday too, the morning traffic was bad with some traffic lights out, etc.

William Kendall said...

That's ahead of time, but behind the original estimate. I did see mention on the news when I got online about the power outage southwest of the city.

Grandma K said...

Bless you. We have become so dependent upon electricity. When it's out, I feel like such a fool when I turn on the switch expecting the light to come on!

Hope it remains on!

Gill - That British Woman said...

dh is an electrician and he said what happened wasn't unusual with the type of weather we had.

Yamini MacLean said...

Hari OM
Always a challenge - when there is outage at my place, I at least have the gas hob... mains gas that is. Love the colour of the truck against snow! YAM xx