Takin' it in Stride

We returned to the River House from our trip to Texas at 1:30 am Friday morning, June 27, 2008. The house was still there, the cats were ok (although they thought they were starving. we knew better because the cat sitter had been there the night before and left them with fresh water and food), and all seemed well.

We let the cats sleep with us that night to keep them quiet and got a pretty good nights sleep.

Friday was spent doing errands, unpacking, catching up with mail and generally having a quiet day.

.

Until 6:30 Friday evening. We had a pretty active thunder storm with about 1.5 inches of rain and lots of wind that afternoon. Frank took a nap during the storm and slept through the thunder and woke up to an explosion. At the same time the power went out. EJ immediately called JEA to report the problem. Suspecting the same problem we always have causing power outages, a blown fuse on one of the power poles, we walked up to check it out.

.

The first thing we found was a concrete power pole broken off about 2/3rds of the way up.

Then we found the cause. A large limb, about 18 inches thick, had fallen on top of the power lines. Instead of pulling the lines out of the pole, it broke the pole.

All the neighbors in the affected area gathered around and inspected the damage. Traffic couldn't get through because the limb was blocking the road. With the help of one of the neighbors we managed to move enough branches and pieces to open up one side of the road.

Knowing that there was no way JEA was going to get this fixed quickly, Frank started the generator so we could have air conditioning, lights, refrigerator and TV. We kept an eye on JEA's progress and about midnight got ready for bed.

We decided to turn off the generator so we precooled the bedroom down to 72 degrees. Then Frank set up a fan connected to a battery through an inverter. That would blow the cool air around until the power came back on.

At 2:30 am power was restored.

Once again, Life is Good.