Power Outage

Last night, actually early evening around 17:30, I was watching a show on the History channel and the electric went off followed about a second or so afterwards with a big BOOM. From the lag between outage and “boom”, I knew it was about an eighth mile away. I figured that a car ran into a pole down near the end of my driveway and took a transformer out. I walked out and down to the road. The neighbors were out and they came over to the fence and said the boom scared them, since it was right out side their house. I looked around and everything looked normal.


At the end of my driveway, on my property, there is a transformer that looks like it feeds my place and the neighbors on both sides of my front access lot. I looked and looked at it and it seemed normal. No burn marks and the fuse looked to be in place. I said it was definitely a transformer blowing or a big fuse blowing to make that much noise. Still didn’t make any sense, so I told the neighbor that I would go back to the house and call the electric company and report a problem.

When they finally got here, they replace a fuse on the transformer on the other side of the road. It wasn’t the one on my property after all. The repairmen were quick and said they didn’t find anything, but it was probably a squirrel that shorted it out.

I was prepared. Went to the neighborhood store and bought my lottery tickets (very important survival tool) and two gallons of cold drinking water (another survival tool). We were prepared to move out to the motor-home for the night. It has a generator and could run the AC and my oxygen machine, which I use when I sleep. Motor-homes are also a good survival tool.

I got an email from Discover magazine last Tuesday and it contained a video clip of the explosion on the sun (a CME). I was going to post it but forgot. Now, it is all over the TV news shows, so figured you all have seen it by now.

You all have a good day now, you hear?