I was in the middle of an email early yesterday evening (about 7PM), when *poof* all the power went off. It wasn’t as much of a shock to me as it was to Pam, who was downstairs in the basement storage room, but she was able to feel her way out in the total dark — emergency lighting kicked in after a minute or so, just as I was making her way to get her, should she have become locked in. There was a Blueberry Buckle in the oven (it’s off now, leaving the dessert about half-baked. I had already made a light dinner of tuna salad and some hot rolls (which were, fortunately, done).
I checked with BC Hydro periodically, and yes, they were working on the outage, which spanned about 6 streets (5th thru 11 or so), in roughly a 15 block area from Hemlock Street to Yew or so (we are at the farthest eastern point of the outage. The other side of Hemlock to the east is fine — Doh!). They first posted that it was a cable problem and would be fixed by 7 PM. Then the set it to 11 PM. Curiously, they said the outage only affected 1100 residents, but since we know for a fact that there are 500 in our block of Hemlock thru Granville, that number is seriously out of whack.
We ate dinner, located some candles and flashlights, took a walk, got back and went to bed. Still no power. I checked again (although my phone was starting to run out of power), and BC Hydro had updated to their estimate of when power would be back to 2 AM. Then this morning, we got up at about 6:30, and still no change. I went to the nearby Wicked Café to get some coffee (since making our own was out). Apparently power was restored at 2AM to every other building but ours. Great. Our building manager is out of the country, on vacation, so that might account for the problem, but it doesn’t help, either. Another call to BC Hydro reports that it is ‘A problem with Customer Equipment’ and that the time they estimate that power will be restored is 4 PM, but given that the history of this set of missed milestones is starting to sound a bit like BP in the Gulf of Mexico, I’m not holding my breath.
So, it’s about 9:45 and I’m writing from Waves downtown. I plan on heading to the library at 10 when it opens, and have an appointment about 3PM, which I will attend unshowered, unshaven (no hot water) and in whatever clothes I could put together. I’m hoping that my computer will come back with all drives and that not too much food in our fridge and freezer was spoiled, but it’s hard to say how much damage has been done.