September 2012 Storm and Aftermath

Yes, this is termination dust on the Chugach range.  We are supposed to get a frost tonight so will have to harvest the mint.

 

 

Hundreds of trees uprooted

 

                                         This poor little house!

 Directing traffic at one of the many intersections where street lights were out.

 
 The flagpole on the Park Strip came down.

Hurray for the Chugach linemen working so hard to restore power!

 

 

 

 

 

Some folks (less than 2000) are still without power after our terrific wind and rainstorm this week.  I feel bad for the elderly and sick who can't afford to go to a hotel.  But our crews were out working double shifts.  We pulled crews from Homer and Golden Valley and by yesterday there were 36 crews for Chugach alone working to get power restored to everyone.

Many small pockets of Anchorage went out.  Chugach lost miles and miles of lines and severely damaged the distribution system.  The hardest-hit areas looked like a bomb zone, according to the crews who were out.  Hundreds of trees heavily laden with leaves went down on lines.  The sparking and arcing on Tuesday night looked like fireworks and the sky was an eerie blue. Small fires erupted, leaving a burned smell in the air.

We were terrified the huge cottonwood in the back yard would come down because that could easily take out any of five houses.  Our neighbors were too.  It was not that one though, but others in neighbors' yards that came crashing down.  I heard the Irish say, "Bob's tree came down in our yard" and I just put my good ear in the pillow and tried to block out the wind.  This area does not usually get this type of wind.

Along Seward highway at McHugh Creek, the wind was recorded at 98 mph until the machine broke!  So we still really do not know (and does it matter) how high the winds blew.  We only know it did major damage and we had many many angry and upset customers who expected us to pay for their spoiled fish, caribou, moose, and bear.

On Wednesday, a sleepy city got up to coffee or no coffee.  School was cancelled, the Anchorage Daily News could not print the paper, hundreds of businesses were closed including the Irish's bank.  Eventually all you could hear was the sound of chainsaws and generators.  Many acts of kindness occurred as Facebook shows.

Our phone lines were overloaded and Member Services could not keep up so they asked others in the building to come and assist.  I never realized the coordination necessary in Dispatch to not only send the crews out to locations but to make sure no crew was near any other crew. 

I worked 3 1/2 hours OT on Thursday and worked the outage lines during the day on Thursday and Friday and in fact just got a call from June as I was next on the list asking me to come in and work.  I am not going to though as I have some major studying to do for the CAP test which is fast coming up and I still feel tired from talking to so many customers and upset that some don't understand that the crews are taking an average of four hours for each outage because they have so much chain saw work to do to get to the downed lines.

June sounded exhausted.