My Sunday Feeling

If you're into natural disasters, Central Arkansas is your kind of place.  Hot on the heels of the historic flooding of the Arkansas River a couple of weeks ago, we had a storm packing 80 MPH straight line winds boil up out of nowhere Wednesday night which knocked the power out for about 80,000 residents.  Some are still out.  What's next?  A plague of locusts?

We were lucky.  Our power at the house was restored late yesterday afternoon.  Not everyone is so fortunate.

I guess I never really thought about this much.  And I think it is because I haven't had to go through many power outages, mainly because my old house was on the grid for the med school and 2 other hospitals.  And it only went out a couple of times in the 20 years or so  I lived there and it never stayed out for very long.  Secondly, I always had someplace to go during 9 to 5.  Suffice it to say, nowadays I do not.

Be that as it may, to me and for the other occupants in my present abode, a protracted power outage is mostly an inconvenience.  As in, I didn't realize we had an electric water heater until I hopped in the shower yesterday morning.  That was exhilarating.  Better June than January however.  

To me, Wednesday through Friday was mostly boring.  We don't realize how much we are addicted to our electronic devices until they are rendered inert.  Or their usage is tapered to keep them from becoming thus.  There's only so much reading one can do to pass the time. But Joe and his mom had jobs to go to.  Sarah went off to visit friends in Conway.  I watched college baseball in a bar.  We got by.  None of us qualify for the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Under the circumstances, boredom or having to merely get by  is a pretty bourgeois response to what many people would describe as a crisis.  As I mentioned earlier some folks are in the 3rd day of being without electricity.  I know a couple of them.  And despite the armada of tree services and electrical workers brought in from all over by Entergy, some folks won't get restored until Sunday night.  Maybe.  

Speaking of Entergy, I was finally able to access a human somewhere in the system after a 45 minute wait Wednesday night.  She advised-evidently reading from a script- me to go outside and check the breakers.  I advised her in return that the electrical box hanging off of my house is practically new and unlikely in the extreme to trip out.

"Are you sure?" she asked.

"I heard something go 'bang'",I said, displaying remarkable composure under the circumstances. "And then the power went out."

"Okay," she said. "That would have been our lateral line.  That is an outage event.  I cannot tell you when service to your area will be restored."

Glad I wasted 45 minutes to get that helpful report.  

Again, we were merely inconvenienced here at my house.  Staying in a hot house or apartment for longer than a day is intolerable for the elderly, those laboring with chronic illnesses or folks with small children.  I have asthma.  By yesterday, I felt as if I were carrying somebody around on my back even with the use of inhaler.  And I'm under good control and otherwise in robust good health.  This sort of thing can kill folks that are seriously compromised.  

So the question I keep hearing was "How come it is taking Entergy so long to get everything back up and running?"  I don't know about you but I spend plenty on my light bill.  I expect the lights to come on when I want them to.  And I expect things to get fixed when they don't.

A friend of mine who is an electrical engineer said that it unreasonable to expect Entergy to maintain a crew as big as what is lumbering through Central Arkansas as I type.  This was a fluky kind of thing that could not have been anticipated.  Another friend of mine has suggested that until we pay to put the powerlines under ground, which we are unwilling to do, we will continue to be plagued by intermittent outages given all of the trees we have, especially in this neighborhood.  

My engineer friend also suggested that the carbon level we humans have pumped into the atmosphere has lead to all the water getting dumped into the rivers from the seemingly ceaseless pattern of rain we have been having.  Which also softens up the ground so that trees get easily felled during violent storms that are also caused by said excessive carbon level.  

Trees turned out to be the culprit on my block.  A couple of trees went down on Hill Road taking a couple of poles down with them.  

The power came back on last night.  But it hasn't yet for thousands of folks.  If you read Entergy's outage map, ( which assumes you that you have the wherewithal to actually access the Internet) most of them are south of I-630, which is a sociological line of demarcation in the minds of some folks between the haves and the have nots in this town. Folks over there deserve good service as much as I do.  And they deserve an explanation as to the methodology of how Entergy goes about the process of restoring power.  Not that they will get it.  But they deserve it.

Entergy says it will do a review of its procedures once things settle down to see how it could have handled this better. 

Now I don't know a lateral line from a forward lateral. But here is (are?) my two cents. 

In the last 30 days we have had a flood of biblical proportions and a violent storm that by all accounts caught everybody in charge by surprise.  

Do we think this will never happen again?