High Winds and Low Power

We had high wind conditions today. I had just made it into work and the sky got dark, it started to blow and the rain came. There were shingles and trim flying off our office building. I heard a cracking sound and looked out my window as a large maple tree came crashing down and bounced off the trunk of a car parked in front of the doctors office across the street. I could see the person frozen in the driver’s seat as the large tree came at her. Several people rushed out of the office to see if she was OK. It was a young girl with a baby in a carrier in the back seat. The tree was large enough that it flattened the rear end of the car onto the pavement. About 5′ difference and they would have had the tree on their heads! We were entertained by a the ensuring parade of police, ambulance, fire trucks and finally the groundskeepers who cut the tree up and pushed it all in pile.

We lost power both at work and at home. I did some paperwork, filled out my medical leave forms, cleaned off my desk, and came home around noon. We fired up our Y2K generator, plugged it into to the breakout box, hit the switch to see what came on. We had heat, some lights and our refrigerator. I ran a 2nd line to plug in our freezer. The only ‘essential’ that didn’t sound good was the deep well water pump. It sounded like it was going to burn up on the power it was getting so I shut it off. We will probably have to re-wire the break out box to use the shallow well pump instead. Power was re-established by mid-afternoon.

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