[NCDXA] Hello World!

[Alfred Laun]

 After 28 and a half hours without power, the lights just came back on.

Actually I knew from past experience it would be a long grind, because I
heard the transformer on the pole in front of a house three doors down from
my own blow up with a bang as I was online Monday morning.   As when that
has happened before, it affects only a small number of houses so it gets a
low priority during widespread storm outages.  My analysis is  that the
amount of snow falling at that moment was so great that water got into the
innards of the transformer.   The winds were not all that heavy.

It is a good thing that I had recently gone over to Staples to buy a whole
bunch of batteries of all different sizes because I was in the process of
getting all my flashlights working again  -- I had come to realize that
none of them were working at that moment.

This allowed me to fire up my Tecsun 660 radio.  I had acquired that radio
for the sole purpose of locating line noise but had used it very little.
No thanks to the lousy Chinese batteries that came with it that they had
all gone bad anyway.  Fortunately with new batteries it came back to life
and I was able to learn from WTOP  that compared to the 100,000+ outages
reported by power companies in VA, PEPCO was reporting only 5000 outages.
As that number crept down finally to 400, I noticed four or five bucket
trucks and three or four supervisors' pickups beginning to line my street.
Fortunately it had been plowed already by Prince Georges County.  It took
them another three hours or so but finally the lights came on.  Within 10
minutes I received a phone call from PEPCO asking me to press "1" if I had
lights.

Normally I maintain my thermostat at 68F.  My brick house is pretty well
insulated so by the time the lights had returned the indoor thermometer
read 51F.  I do have a small space heater in my bedroom but of course it
runs on electricity!  I survived by sleeping under two heavy quilts and
wearing my outdoor jacket whenever I was up and around.

I consider myself very lucky that I was at home at the time the storm hit.
My amount of suffering was insignificant compared to what the folks on I-95
between Alexandria and Fredericksburg suffered, or even those who happened
to be driving on or near the Wilson Bridge at the time.

73, Fred, K3ZO






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