noise."My Bad Neighbor* · 12:34am Jul 23rd, 2022
I was gonna start this one out by telling you about my bad neighbor–you remember, the one who crashed a car across my driveway and left it there?
Then I remembered that I never blogged about that, so you’d have no idea what I’m talking about.
That’s okay, who doesn’t love a bit of backstory?
For reasons which will become obvious (but which are also spoilers), there may be a higher number of typos and a lower number of pictures than you’re used to seeing.
It all started last October. Well, I think it was October, anyway. Last year. It was last year.
I’d worked my usual day at the shop, and was looking forward to kicking back and relaxing, but when I rounded the corner to my house, there was a wrecked GMC Envoy completely blocking my driveway.
I parked along the side of the road and could see a trail of debris where this thing had left the road, demolished a couple of mailboxes, yeeted itself over a driveway, and finally fetched up against the guardrail that’s right next to my driveway.
The guardrail’s to keep cars from falling into the void that’s next to my drive. So far that hasn’t really been an issue; I’m on the inside of the curve, so it takes more effort for speeders or careless drivers to crash onto my property. This person had managed.
Now, I used to drive wrecker, and usually what happened after a road accident is the driver would call for a tow truck to take away their car, or the police would do it. Cars didn’t just get left were they’d fallen.
So I called the county non-emergency line (we don’t have a police department in my county) and the dispatcher there said that she would try and get in touch with the police officer who had responded to the original call.
I said that I wanted this thing gone; it’s blocking my driveway.
To make a long story short (first time I’ve ever done that), the person who owned the Envoy lived a couple of doors down and promised that he’d get it towed. After I’d gotten a police officer underway, he came down to talk to me and said that he was gonna call AAA and have it towed, but he couldn’t remember their number.
Their Michigan number is 1-800-AAA-MICH and I didn’t have to look that up. It’s an easy number to remember.
The reason I didn’t blog about it was ‘cause I wrote a story about it instead. Since it wasn’t a pony story, you won’t find it here.
I can't link it off my phone, but I'll give y'all a link in the follow-up blog.
Which brings us to today. More specifically, last night.
Here on Earth we don’t have (to the best of my knowledge) Severe Weather Appreciation Week, but we do have occasional Severe Weather Appreciation Days. Yesterday was one of those days; we got heavy rain and hail and thunder and all that comes with it, including a short power failure. Not too surprising, the rain was coming down in buckets and the wind was whipping around. Power came back on pretty quick, and I went back to my YouTube video about bog people.
Shortly after, it went out again.
Well, sort of.
The computers went dark, the lights in the room went dark, but the light in my bedroom was still on and so was the fan. I checked the circuit breakers, sure that one of them had tripped for some reason, but it hadn’t.
I then came to the determination that I’d lost one phase of my power, so one side of my circuit breaker board was live and the other one wasn’t. That was later confirmed by the lights on the Big Green Box™ that’s across the street from me: it’s below a transformer and normally has two green lights, but last night it had one red light and one green light. We’ll get to that in a minute.
At the moment, I hadn’t looked at the Big Green Box™ yet, so I didn’t know what was going on.
During a break in the rain, I looked outside, and saw a bunch of flashing amber lights, figured Consumer’s was really on the ball fixing this power outage. However, it was a semi truck carrying a big roll-on roll-off dumpster, and he had all the lights on his truck. Normal lights and blinky lights and as I would also later find out, really bright floodlights.
He told me that there was a tree down across power lines, and he’d been trying to squeeze around it when it started sparking and he decided that he didn’t want to play with electricity, so he’d backed off a safe distance and called 911 to report it.
This was when I noticed the state of the Big Green Box™, and I also watched a few brave or foolhardy souls driving past.
I took a lot of pictures and they’d really add to this, but . . . well, we’ll get to that.
Since I was up and I could hardly finish edits on the latest chapter of Rose and Sam or Como Salsa Por Los Tacos, I went on a little driving adventure myself. Lots of trees and limbs down, and my boss also lost power when a tree took out power to his street. In hindsight, I might have driven across that power line; I found out later that it fell across the street I was driving on. If I did, I can say that a 98 Dodge Ram 1500 and its occupant can survive crossing a power line which may or may not have been live [if I did cross it by mistake, I assume it wasn’t live; the last one I saw that was down and still live was making lots of exciting blue sparks on the road, which made it much easier to spot].
And then I parked my truck and went to bed. Wasn’t anything else to do, and I had confidence that by the the morning the power would be restored.
The fact that I’m typing this on the cheap laptop I’ve got which still has battery power left before copy-pasting it to my cell phone so I can post it to Fimfic will tell you all you need to know.
At some point during the night, they moved the tree off the road, and either in doing so, or as a precaution, the rest of the electricity was shut off. Now I don’t have power on either side of my breaker box.
I got a better look at the carnage this morning. The tree not only took down the cable and one of the lower-down power lines, it also snapped a pole off.
Which brings me back to my neighbor, the one who left a wrecked Envoy across my driveway. Guess who owns that tree?
It’s not really his fault, not unless he was out there at night in a thunderstorm with a chainsaw and the desire to do some ill-advised pruning.
(Thus far none of the trees on my property have dropped big limbs on anything really important, although in 2020 one of my cottonwoods decided that my shed was ugly and demolished it for me.
(I’ll grant that the shed was ugly, and in poor condition, and that the tree limb did a fine job of destroying it.)
When I’d finished my driveabout in my Ram, I had to wait for the RO-RO semi to back down the state highway. He was using his rear floodlights to good effect, and managed to back around the curve on the highway, then onto a side street far enough he could turn his truck around.
I got a full look at the damage in the morning, and I also got a number of e-mails from Consumer’s telling me that they knew about the outage, and they had an estimated time of repair.
1 am.
Then a follow-up email; it would be 3 am.
Five am.
There were trucks working by 8 am; they had the Big Green Box™ open but of course unless it was a magical box, it couldn’t fix the broken power pole or put the line back on it.
By ten, they’d closed the BGB, run a new wire from it which was coiled around the base of that pole, and they’d also hooked a portable Honda generator up to the BGB. Which is actually amusing (and another reason I wish I could post photos); it looks like somebody thought they could power a few houses with a lunchbox-sized portable generator hooked up to a power line.
Consumer’s kept sending me optimistic e-mails. Last time I checked there were nine of them, all promising that they’d have the power back on in a couple of hours. I’m no expert, but I don’t expect it to be back on until an hour or so after the power pole planting truck arrives with a fresh pole to install.
So that’s the story about my bad neighbor 
I’ll follow up with the pictures later, I guess.
Also, for what it’s worth, the latest email from Consumer’s says that they’ll have the power fixed by 8:45 for sure. Which will be close to the time that I post the blog . . . we’ll see what happens.
*Clickbait title is clickbait
5674514 The clickbait for me was Sunset.
From what I've heard about the US, this is about the level of competence I'd expect from what I assume is your power company. It's funnier to assume that whoever is sending out those updates has genuinely believed ever since the original 1am estimate that the power will be restored any minute now because it's not like those poles really do anything right?
It is after 8.45 and there is no power pole. There is a tree removal truck removing the tree, though, so thats progress.
Edit: I also just got another email; now it should be fixed by 12:30 AM.
This is what happens when our stupid ancestors decide to leave the trees and evolve like a buncha assholes. All our shit is broken.
5674520
In the US and Canada, much of the issue is the sheer distance involved. The power lines have a long way to go, usually through some really rough terrain. When there's 100+ sections of line down, it takes a while to get power back.
Sorry about the nightmare.
(That pega-sis is one tail-swipe from losing a tail and possibly her life. Social responsibility, artist!)
5674529
That is both true and completely irrelevant. I'm talking about how the notifications are completely detached from reality.
Ty ty ty for that link. Been meaning to reread that and forgot to fav it.
So I take it that it is difficult to have all of your lines under ground?
Ayyea, this is the exact reason why I always kinda tensed up when going through older parts of my town (Yulin, Guangxi ZAR, PRC) where weathered power lines are hanging overhead, some of them are even a messy cluster of lines that just don‘t make sense. IMO overhead power lines are just hanging there to eventually fail from either deterioration or extreme weather and fall off to electrocute some poor pedestrians, at least you don‘t see any of that in the newer parts of the town which I assume the lines are all underground.
PS: Nevertheless I think the way you write in blogs is kinda cute? :3
aww the fun and joy of no power.
as you are a mechanic i am vary surprised you have not picked up a nice generator (not working ) from your local CL cheep and fixed it.
i got my hands on a 14KW last year that had to be torn down (the govern blow apart internal) and put 400 in it in parts and now have one that will run my hole house on one tank of gas for 12 hours. 10 gallon tank.
just a idea.
Live power lines on the ground just make me think of G.I. Joe.
Body massage!
imgur.com/f4GjQIe.png
5674529
depends on where you are. Here I haven't had a power outage of longer than 3 hours since... sometime between 2014 and 2016? Either way the entire region got pounded by microbursts and even in the middle of the city here there were issues just getting around in cars.
And this is why routine trimming of trees is important... also removal of potential trouble trees, but that's a whole 'nother kettle o' fish.
He gave you a free car. What's not to like?
I've found that power companies are the most optimistic people in the world. Over here in Vegas, older parts of the city can lose power during the summer monsoons, and everyone who lives there knows to add an hour to whatever Nevada Energy says.
They could power a few houses with a generator that small, if it was a gas turbine. But admittedly that might not be a good idea considering the noise they make and their fuel consumption.
Last time something like that happened here, it was a week without power.
5674517
The best clickbait there is
A '98 Ram 1500 can do a lot of things, it seems. You found it can drive harmlessly over live power lines. I found it can drive up a hill sideways*. If it had better fuel economy (or any fuel economy), then it would be a great vehicle.
*It was snowing heavily on my way home from work.
5674532
"We think it'll be back in 3 hours."
"Hey, boss. Five more sections of line are down in a higher-priority run."
"Shit. Do that first."
Happens a lot.
I guess it was a good thing you weren't listening to Snap! at the time, because you really didn't have the power. ()^_^
(For the lack of anything worthwhile to say. Apologies.)
5674618
For what it's worth, I don't think I received any notifications of when power would be back when it was down for most of a week back a bit and that's probably a smarter way to do it. Especially since I didn't have a real way to actually receive the notifications until they restored power.
Do ponies use DC?
Seems like most of their towns are small enough for it not to matter much for long distance transmission. Except maybe Manehatten. Also seems like they don't have much (if anything) that would benefit from AC power. I'll bet light bulb filaments are platinum. It's a really good filament material, and one of the earliest, it's just expensive and rare (on our planet). There would be little reason for them to have ever discovered how to draw tungsten into a wire (a pain in the ass, apparently).
*flashbacks to late May when one of the biggest storms in Canadian history tore through my area, knocking people's power out, for over a week in some cases*
media.discordapp.net/attachments/809269078262677504/978681220156252200/unknown.png
This is a picture of a tree in the storm winds. It was wildin.
Hope you get power soon!
5674530
Nah, it's fine, most pegasus aren't well grounded.
5674735
Fun fact, long distance transmission is only part of the reason why we use AC. It's high voltage that helps reduce transmission losses, and that also works with DC.
The reason why AC became dominant is a combination of factors, including the fact that most of our power is generated from rotating turbines of some sort, whether they be steam, wind, water or gas. Rotating magnets through coils produces AC current. The other reason is that AC makes it efficient and convenient to manipulate and control power with relatively simpler frequency domain techniques like capacitors, inductors and transformers.
I bet he's Canadian...
(Blame Canada!)
Now I'm expecting a scene to eventually pop up where the Apples use the overpowered cooperative earth pony-ness to replace such a pole in just a few minutes.
This guy from ASDF would like to have a word with you:
Well, we still have this one:
- MLP: FiM
- Comedy
- Slice of Life
Ponies and horsepower aren't a good mix, as Rarity finds out when she wrecks her Lambo. At least the airbag worked.5674786 Even funner fact is that DC is starting to be used for long distance transmission. Turns out that AC kind of sucks for long distance. DC is much better because it's immune to capacitance and inductance which occur naturally over long cables. Basically, because we can have reliable solid state super huge diodes and transistors now, DC can be transmitted at high voltage, and stepped down, then converted back to AC. That was its major transmission drawback for the longest time, we didn't have the electronic technology to step the voltage up and down with DC. AC only needs a simple transformer.
Also, DC can be generated with a dynamo just fine. The rotating magnetic pulses though, do mean that it's a pulsating DC. But that works just fine.
5674517
Isn't she cute? I love Sunset.
5674520
You're probably thinking Texas; we've got a reasonably competent power company, and they usually get things fixed pretty quick. I'd assume until they got the first actual crew out in the morning, they didn't know the pole was broken (how could they?) and then they had to get a pole and a pole-installing truck and a tree truck all on scene while they were recovering from a series of major storms that rolled across the state. They were likely also prioritizing larger-scale outages--I think this one probably affected less than a dozen houses.
It would be nice if their e-mail updater was more accurate; on the other hand, since I could see with my own eyes what the problem was and what it would take to fix it, I could judge by what trucks were or weren't there how the repair was progressing.
5674526
Whenever my co-worker complains about his life (having to work, having to pay taxes, etc.), he always blames Eve.
Strangely enough we also had at least one wire down due to rain/wind - I was looking outside for my dogs and thought at first it was firework ...then after few more sparks lights died nearly exactly at midnight. Dogs returned home shortly, I turned off laptop and decided to sleep. ~14 hours after both power and I was up ...
5674529
The town where I used to live got grazed by a tornado (it never touched down in town, and didn't completely destroy any houses). When we were walking around the next day looking at the damage, I happened to notice that the power line was down between every pole on the street next to ours--I'm sure that they wound up having to re-string about half the town to restore power.
Since I moved here, it's never been out for more than 48 hours, which is pretty good for living out in the country. My manager asked why I didn't have a generator, and I said that I've never had an outage for long enough to justify it.
5674530
No worries! Messed up some of my plans, but otherwise no real issues. And I got two fun blog posts out of it, so there's that.
I assume that pegasi are reasonably immune to electricity, so she'll probably be fine.
5674534
It's a fantastic story, and Gardez really captured what it is to be a pegasus.
5674542
It's generally too expensive, that's why they don't do it in the country.
5674545
We've had two of the 20,000 volt lines fall off the pole near our shop (which is not ideal) and the ones that are still up there are not in good shape. It would be nice if the power company could replace some of the infrastructure in our town . . . some of it did get done a few years back, but I remember the technician pointing out a transformer on a nearby pole and saying he remembered back in the 70s when they were pulling those out since they liked to explode. I guess that one got missed. Hasn't exploded yet, though.
The power pole next to our shop, where the power comes in, is about to celebrate its 100th birthday. According to the date nail that used to be on it, it was installed in the mid-1920s.
5674546
I've thought about it, but I've never had a power outage long enough to justify it. Nor do I really have a good place to put one. Maybe when I get a shed built, I'll think about it. I could probably get one with a bad motor and run it off one of my cars.
5674549
I legit never watched GI Joe.
I did win an award many many years ago for making a poster warning about the dangers of downed power lines.
5674550
This one wasn't quite that bad, but there were a lot of limbs down. Some years back, I was in a nearby town and on my way back home I had to make three detours for trees across the road.
One nice thing about being in the country is that trees often get cleared faster than the county can get to them; the first guy or girl on scene who has a chainsaw just takes care of it.
5674583
It was a fun time, I'll tell you that.
Now I've got my power back, although it went out yesterday and again today when more storms rolled through. I was away at work, though, and it was back on when I got home.
5674589
They've been doing it in my area; one of the parking lots behind a local gas station has become an overnight storage lot for tree-trimming trucks. But of course they can't cut down every tree that could possibly fall on a power line (or homeowners would be furious), so they get the obvious stuff and hope for the best with the rest.
5674591
It was a GMC Envoy, which is one of the vehicles I wouldn't want even if someone gave it to me for free. They're horrible to maintain and cheaply built.
5674595
I don't know how good their power outage calculator is, but of course it can't have accurate results until somebody actually looks at what the cause of the problem is.
I do know that we also use a labor guide for automotive repairs, and sometimes the time allotted is also wildly optimistic if there's a lot of rust. Which there often is. From my point of view, I'd rather have gotten one after the first crew got out there saying that the pole was broken, and it would be fixed as soon as they got a new pole.
I was amused by how many they sent, though.
5674597
In theory, yeah. But that wouldn't have solved the problem of the power line not having a pole to attach to (which was the main delay). I think how they run the lines and how the transformer works was why I only lost half my power to begin with, then the rest of it when Consumer's got out there the first time (since I assume they turned off the live line).
5674599
I've been lucky and dodged that so far. Either the storms haven't been bad enough, or Consumer's is on the ball when it comes to repairs. The last long outage near me was a few years back during an ice storm, and I was lucky enough to just be south of the area that got hit hard.