tonight power went off again and hubby doesn't like to get generator out in the rain. Anyone else have this problem? I just blew out the candles and oil lamps we keep them on the mantle at all times.
Rarely a week goes by that the power doesn't go off at least long enough to restart the computer and mess up the digital clocks. Not sure what is happening. During storms it is due in part to a lot of very old trees in my area, which is the older section of town. They, and their limbs, are always going down on the power lines.
Oh yes the trees! We have a huge oak that smashed out fence and its a 5' no climb so very expensive and hard to repair. Hubby took the truck and got 3 tress laying across the trail last month.Its getting to be way too much work.Power will go out for days sometimes. So have to keep generator ready but still have to pull it out aand bring to house.
I moved into my rural spot in 2010, with a 1/2 mile power line run from the main road to the pole in my driveway. I bought all sorts of lanterns & fuel & such, fully expecting outages to be a part of life. I have been pleasantly surprised at how reliable things have been. In 2013 or so we had severe wind-sheers go through called El Derecho. I don't know how wide spread this was on the east coast. Some folks lost power for days. Trees were down everywhere. I may have lost power for a couple of days. After that, my power company went through and cleared a wide swath all along the right-of-way where the lines went. The narrow path for my power line to get to the road was now 10x as wide as it had been. They cleared all the way up to my utility pole, pushing my woods-line back a good 20 feet. Things got even more reliable after that. It's funny, my power company is a small co-op. There is a gated community near the interstate that had Dominion Electric (a wide-spread behemoth), and those people are forever complaining about outages.
@Marie Mallery My wife mentioned awhile ago that the entire City of New Orleans was without power! Hot and humid, no A/C? In the Missouri Ozarks, our power went out every time a gust of wind exceeded 40 mph! The system of wooden poles had been installed in the 1950s, and were breaking off one after another. Several outages a month, usually repaired withing less than a day.
It seems down here it is the transformers that keep getting knocked out by lightening.Sometimes trees will hit a line but mostly those are cut back and don't caus failure as often as transformer being fried ..
Power seldom goes out here, but when it does in the winter it is a critical thing. I always advise people to have some kind of back-up heat in case the is a power outage in winter. During the summer, the days are incredibly long and the temps not severe, but winter is a different story and things get life-threatening in short order.
I can understand that but here with heat and humidity it can get real bad too but not as bad as freezing.
We visited Alaska in the summer once. It was beautiful. Seemed like a great place to live. But the winters would scare me, especially living outside of a populated area. I suppose everyone is super careful about backups being operational. But what if there was an earthquake in the dead of winter. Yikes!
Yeah, not good to have a quake in the cold. We had one on the cusp of the cold weather in November 2018. We lost a lot of stuff, but the roads and such got repaired quickly.. The FEMA people said Alaska got done in weeks what would have taken months or years on most other places. Few tourists here at that time, so there were places to relocate people who lost their homes. Our most severe outage was years ago when the power company "upgraded" the lines or something during the summer. They didn't leave enough slack in the lines and when the temperature dropped to -37 F., the lines contracted and snapped poles and supports all over the area. We were without power for 18 hours at temperatures that remained -30 F. or below. The linemen who goofed had to pay the price of being on the poles in those temps.
@Don Alaska: Are there a lot of lightning storms in Alaska in the summer? Forest fires? I don't recall ever hearing of any.
There are many fires every summer, and most of the lightning strikes are in the interior around Fairbanks and McGrath. We are in wildfire danger every summer. You don't hear too much about the fires unless they are in a populated area, but since there is so much space here with few or no people, it doesn't make headlines. Here are some statistics for last year.
Me either. Don, just one more question... (sorry I think I am taking this thread off topic) The first thing I noticed when we drove into Alaska was no tall trees along the road, and they were almost all pines. All the way to Fairbanks. This was back in the 1950's. I did a Google StreetView on the Alaska highway, and it looks the same way now. Are there no tall trees in Alaska? What about way off the main roads? If so, is it because of the cold weather?