Post by JustIan on Oct 26, 2006 8:15:03 GMT -6
Hi Gang,
I just got back from Buffalo. I was out there with 2800 other workers working 16 hours a day restoring power to Doc and 396,999 other homes and businesses. We were lucky and were able to sleep in a hotel every night except for last Saturday when we got kicked out of our rooms due to a concert in town and the Bills game. The damage there was incredible. Most of it was just to the power lines. A lot of the houses that lost power were due to a tree limb that broke off on their property so every individual house had to be checked before each circuit could be turned back on.
Most of the people were very courteous to us, bringing out coffee and snacks. Natural gas is the most common method of cooking and heating in Buffalo. On one street some kids were throwing rocks and snowballs at us but that didn't last very long. On another street one dumb fuck decided that he could make a little extra money by stealing the transformer from a pole that had fallen down and all the copper wire on the street. The police caught and arrested him.
He lived on the same street! So instead of reconnecting broken wires on that street which would have taken one or two trucks half a day it took five trucks two days to rewire the whole street.
As you can well imagine people always come out to ask when we will be done and we were sure to tell them that they would have had power yesterday if the wire hadn't been stolen. I imagine that that guy will be moving soon. In the picture with the red car you can see the lack of wires on the poles. I included a few photos I took with my cell phone but you can see some professional ones on this site. Note all the leaves still on the trees which was the root of the problem.
I just got back from Buffalo. I was out there with 2800 other workers working 16 hours a day restoring power to Doc and 396,999 other homes and businesses. We were lucky and were able to sleep in a hotel every night except for last Saturday when we got kicked out of our rooms due to a concert in town and the Bills game. The damage there was incredible. Most of it was just to the power lines. A lot of the houses that lost power were due to a tree limb that broke off on their property so every individual house had to be checked before each circuit could be turned back on.
Most of the people were very courteous to us, bringing out coffee and snacks. Natural gas is the most common method of cooking and heating in Buffalo. On one street some kids were throwing rocks and snowballs at us but that didn't last very long. On another street one dumb fuck decided that he could make a little extra money by stealing the transformer from a pole that had fallen down and all the copper wire on the street. The police caught and arrested him.
He lived on the same street! So instead of reconnecting broken wires on that street which would have taken one or two trucks half a day it took five trucks two days to rewire the whole street.
As you can well imagine people always come out to ask when we will be done and we were sure to tell them that they would have had power yesterday if the wire hadn't been stolen. I imagine that that guy will be moving soon. In the picture with the red car you can see the lack of wires on the poles. I included a few photos I took with my cell phone but you can see some professional ones on this site. Note all the leaves still on the trees which was the root of the problem.
