I have lived in this house for eight and a half years now. Yesterday was the third time in those eight and a half years that we had a power outage due to something in our yard or at the bottom of our driveway.
Lightening struck the ground about 4 years ago and blew out the transformer on the utility pole in our yard. Ben was in his high chair and I was feeding him lunch when I saw the lightening hit the ground between our house and our neighbor's house where the underground electric line/ cable/ and telephone runs. Talk about LOUD and scaring the pants off you. The lightening came through the line, up the pole, blew up the transformer then came through our house, blew the well cap off our well pipe, blew out an electric wire in the basement where the wire made a 90 degree bend. We lost our TV, VCR, garage door opener, phones, the cable and my computer modem.
Twice now a huge tree at the bottom of our driveway has fallen over and blocked the road, taking the utility lines with it. We had severe storms yesterday afternoon. In fact the kids and I were in the basement bathroom for a bit because there was a tornado watch for the town I live in. A lot of trees were down around the area and we had the action right in front of us again. We went to McDonald's to get supper since I had no power to cook with and I took some pictures. This is going down the driveway....
My neighbor below us put wooden saw horses up because people were coming up my driveway, driving across the grass and going down his driveway to get through. With all the rain the ground was muddy and the grass was getting ruined.
I took this one on the way back from McDonald's...
My driveway is the first one to the right, so luckily we were still able to get in and out, and so was our neighbor on the other side of the tree.
Power was out for about 12 hours... I woke up around 3:00 a.m. and the lights were back on. I said something to Todd about doing the math to figure out how often we have these situations and it's once every 2.83333 years. I guess we're good to go for a few years again. :-)
that had to be scarey, but thank goodness none of you were hurt! I heard you got golfball sized hail in your neck of the woods too!
Posted by: Carol | August 18, 2007 at 09:09 PM