Lately I’ve been trying to get to bed a lot earlier, and about 1 a.m. yesterday I was brushing my teeth when most, but not all, of the lights in our apartment went out. It was so strange I woke up Andy. He checked the circuit breakers, which were fine. We have plenty of flashlights for such an occasion, so Andy looked up the emergency/after-hours phone number for the apartments.
When I phoned it, the fellow asked about the circuit breakers, said there was no way to contact the county then, but he would send someone over in the morning to see what was going on. If things changed before then please phone him.
Okay. I know the county crews work nights and weekends, so I ended up phoning our friendly police department to find out what to do. The dispatcher was very helpful. She waited while I double-checked that it wasn’t just our apartment that was having problems, took my phone number, and contacted the county for us. The fellow there phoned us to get the details, and a few minutes later a county truck appeared in our parking lot and a couple of guys started looking for the problem. Andy and I went to bed.
I woke up briefly around 6 a.m., saw the lights were on in the other room, and phoned our after-hours apartment fellow to tell him the problem had been fixed.
Today I wrote to the police department and the county public works department to thank them for the prompt service. Yay, electricity! Yay, county! Is it any wonder I love this place?
November 10, 2014
Why on earth did you need the lights fixed in the middle of the night since you were going to bed anyway?
U
Are lights the only thing you use electricity for? If the electricity went out in your apartment complex on the weekend would you wait for someone else to report it?
I’m glad you got your power back on so quickly and that it was, apparently, somewhat localized.
Our outage reporting is pretty much automated, as I described for our last loss of power in A flash and a boom and a zzzzzzztttt!!.
Since we are supplied by a large utility, we report as soon as we lose power in order to be on record. I don’t know if it makes much difference.
Hopefully, this year won’t be like last year with cold weather, storms, and losing power. We’re prepared, but there are a lot of people who aren’t. When we drive down to the nearest large town, we see the line crews upgrading the power poles to carry a new circuit that will improve reliability, but that project won’t be done before the cold and storms start arriving. Temperatures are supposed to drop significantly tomorrow, with a chance for freezing precipitation on the weekend.
We’re not prepared down here in the apartment for the electricity to go out for a long time. And it could happen because of our aging infrastructure. We’re keeping our fingers crossed and will deal with it if it happens. I think you’re smart to be prepared.
well the services are much different here…you contact your provider, sometimes when they answer a disembodied voice explains the outage; others have online system – not much use if you’ve at home though…
then if you are random it will fixed quickly if the whole city is trouble – you wait your turn…sometimes your lights are back on quickly but your hot water service may not be…
you make do until the power comes back on…many bigger stores have back up generators – or the next grid over may not be affected. I happen to live on the grid that services a number of banks, the council offices and the Mall (mall has generators) and we are often first back in this area…
It sounds as if you’re in a good location. 🙂 I’ve heard that a lot of stores in the U.S. have their own generators/solar power/etc. nowadays. And the military is trying to make itself independent of the power grid.
Cool.
Yes. 🙂
Yay!!!!! I’m glad you got such great service!
Good service all round. You are indeed lucky.
Yes. Unless a transformer blows because of the aging infrastructure. They’re doing a great job of keeping things working.