Powerless, Again

By petrini1 on August 30, 2024

Outside, the sky flashed with the occasional lightning bolt last night as my son and I streamed a movie. At about 11:30, just as the movie was about to reach the climactic scene, everything went dark. The power was out. This was the second major power outage this summer. We reported it to the power company and searched for more information. What had caused it? Where was the source of the problem? And when would the lights come back on? Our questions were unanswered that night, except that we could see that the houses across the street had lights, and the ones on our side of the street did not.

Just before we gave up and went to bed, the power company's site provided the fact that our outage affected 27 households.

This morning, I woke up to find that the power was still off. My husband, who was scheduled to work at home today, decided he would have to go into the office. On his way to the Metro, he saw the cause of the outage: A tree in our neighbor's yard had fallen on a power line and pulled it down. A few hours later, the line was fixed and the lights came back on. And things are pretty much back to normal now.