Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Power Out

Woodbury, Connecticut

I wonder why the lights went out?

Lights and my 27" Thunderbolt display went dark about 3:30 this afternoon. Tina tells me that Marshall (he's a cat) jumped out of his perch in the window just before the power cut off.  Clear blue sky, no wind. I needed to get something in town, got this far, turned around and went the long way. Coming back the long way I had to explain to a trooper at a roadblock that I lived "this side of the tree." Then  I walked out to the corner of our property and a couple dozen yards beyond, to find this view and take a snap. The word was out that it would take 4-6 hours to fix, but fix what? They've got to get the tree out of the road, but I was amazed to find not only the power, but the cable back on (maybe the cable was never severed but how would I know without electricity?) when I walked back into the house at about six. A pole went down, so we should be prepared for a possible power drop (if it carried a transformer, I don't know if it did).

This is a problem here in Southern New England, where much of our land is "ledge" a legacy of glaciation. Enormous oaks (this looks like one from a distance) and maples manage to sink enough roots to sustain growth, without an appropriate root system for structure, because they are basically growing in topsoil on cracked granite with subsoil in the cracks. It's amazing that anything grows here. I think I'll post this now, before there might be another connection problem about the utility pole that has to be replaced.

1 comment:

James Weekes said...

As a twenty year resident of Vermont I can sympathize. Ledge was a way of life and we were always amazed at how little wind or rain it took to bring a large oak or maple down. They just couldn't get their tap root down far enough. Here in Florida, with a very shallow aquifer, the trees send their roots sideways.