During the evening of Sunday, June 3, a brief storm rolled through the Puget Sound, dumping rain on Magnolia, accompanied by rolling thunder and a little lightning.
I came home around 8:30 p.m. from a food-to-go run to find all the lights in our house, and our neighborhood, out once again. Our best guess was that they went out somewhere between 7 and 8. At the risk of leaving myself open to criticism, we were once again in the dark.
We ate dinner by battery-powered lamplight, listening to the not-unpleasant silence that surrounded our home, and wondering why the power goes out so frequently in our neighborhood of underground utilities.
Around 9:30, I placed a call to Seattle City Light to see what they could tell me about how long we might be sitting in the dark. The nice woman at the other end of the line informed me that they were trying to find a supervisor to come in, and to assemble a crew to repair what looked like a problem underground, and that it would likely be several more hours before the power was restored. I thanked her for the update and hung up.
Power was restored approximately eight hours after it went out, around 4 a.m.
This raised several questions. Why doesn't SCL have crews on-call for weekend outages - a sort of SWAT team approach? It would seem that you would automatically have a rotating list of workers who understand they are on call in an event like this, and who can come in to work within, say, 60 minutes, pull together the necessary gear and get to the problem as quickly as possible.
It also raises the question of how prepared SCL, and perhaps other city agencies, are for a catastrophic event like a major earthquake, another gigantic windstorm or, heaven forbid, a terrorist attack of some sort that takes out power around the city.
If it takes eight hours to respond to and repair what looked like a fairly limited outage - the power was still on in the Village and surrounding areas, so I'm guessing it was limited to our grid - then how long will it take if there's a really big event?
There's also the issue of this recurring outage in our neighborhood. It seems that every time we have one of these gully-washers, the power goes out. I can understand that, with underground utilities, problems with excess water can occur, causing a disruption in service. Maybe there's a low spot where water can accumulate.
I can see that happening once, twice, perhaps three times. What I can't understand is why, after more than 14 years living in the same house, it's still happening. Am I to believe this has happened in a different place in the tunnel each time? Seems unlikely. That begs the question of why it hasn't been fixed so that it doesn't keep recurring. An ounce of prevention, and all that rot.
If we can't find a way to insulate our underground utilities from the rain, a climatic inevitability in Seattle, then maybe we need to consider putting them back aboveground where all we are concerned with is the occasional drunk running into a power pole.
I don't think any of us want to go back to poles and lines, especially in those areas where we can enjoy our beautiful views from Magnolia, but it is frustrating to see what seems to be the same problem popping up over and over.
We thought when the new superintendent, Jorge Carrasco, moved in down the street, we might be assured of quick solutions to problems like the other night. Not so. I guess you could read something positive into that: he's not getting special treatment from his people.
I'm sure running the lights in a city as big as Seattle is a monumental job, but there are times that you wonder what they're doing down there when they seemingly don't have crews ready to scramble when power goes out somewhere in the city.
I guess my wonder is a result of working at Boeing where we had AOG teams - that stands for "airplane on the ground." These were teams of people who responded to a plane on a runway with a mechanical problem. They pulled out all the stops to get that plane repaired and in the air again, sort of a Nordstrom-like approach to customer service.
It would be nice to see that kind of customer satisfaction strategy emanating from city hall.
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