Tuesday, December 19, 2006

progress report

Still no work done yet on the tree that went down at 63rd other from clearing a lane so that the traffic can get through. This is one of three sets of lines (that I know about) that are down in our neighborhood; the furthest appears to have been fixed (yesterday), or at least doesn't still have wires supporting a tree trunk dangling 6 feet off the ground above a bunch of orange cones. For the second set, they'd gotten rid of the tree back on Friday, but the wires are still flat on the road with people driving over them. Granted, I don't know for sure which wires are prerequisites for our getting power back -- there is some surprising connectivity in places -- but I'm guessing it's not a bad measure of how much has been done and how much remains.

There are still something on the order of 150,000 people without power in the Puget Sound area. November was one of the rainiest months on record, thus the soil was nice and soft, meaning the storm arrived at the worst possible time. And now, apparently They are having to rebuild everything. If you imagine that the storm explicitly targetted and destroyed every substation and transformer pole east of Seattle, you wouldn't be too far off.

In other news we're fine and the house appears to have emerged unscathed. Temperature has been threatening to go below freezing but that hasn't quite happened yet, so the pipes are intact, and hopefully the leaky toilet will keep things that way. And even though the furnace needs electricity for the blower, the gas hot water heater does not.

It could be argued that we lucked out in having our biggest tree go down six weeks ago; it was about 50 feet tall and landed in the driveway, missing the house and both of the cars -- the idea being that if it had survived until last Thursday, when the wind was coming directly from the south, it would have been blown straight into the living room (which, I'll grant, is not actually where LambdaMOO is, but this still would have been cause for some sadness...)

Current word is maybe Friday. At this point, I'll believe it when I see it.

There's also evidently another storm on the way, albeit a much smaller one, though I like to think that all of the trees that are currently inclined to go over would have already been pushed by the big storm and thus already be gone, so...

Update (3:51 pm PST): woohoo. Tree at 63rd has been cleared. The wires there still look dodgy, but one thing at a time... Wires lying in the road on Island Crest at 62nd are still there.