Rural Power Woes

It was a surprise the other night to lose power. It had been a beautiful spring day, no wind to speak of and no rain either. But sometime between 11pm and midnight the power went out.

With our locker beef freezers we are diligent about keeping a minimum of power available to keep them running. So when the power went out and the interruption alarm went off, we jumped out of bed to get the backup power source up and running.

The first thought was where in the heck was the generator. Since it was such a mild winter devoid of any big storms, we had stowed the generator in the barn across the river to keep it ready for action under a protective tarp. We had it sitting on a pallet because a wheel had broken the last time we used it and that was one of those little jobs that we didn’t get around to fixing. So we would need to bring the generator and the pallet. That means we would need to use the pallet forks on the tractor. But where was the tractor? We had used it to move pallets of firewood so it was out in the show barn. Luckily the pallet forks were already on it instead of the bucket or that would be a half hour of changing the loading equipment.

Rounding up a couple of flashlights, we trekked out to the show barn and opened the gates to get the tractor out then closed them so the cows would not get in. Mike drove the tractor through the field to the fence into the yard before closing those fences after the tractor drove through.

Once in the yard, we had to open the front gate at the end of the driveway and the one across the road so the tractor could go over the bridge to the barn over the river. More gates at that barn got opened and closed after retrieving the generator that was on the pallet.

Gates were opened and closed as the tractor went through and we got the generator set up in the driveway.

With the freezers up and running, Mike tootled back off to bed and by now it was nearing 1am. By 3:30 I was waking him back up because the power was on again. He was slower jumping out of bed this second time but made it up by 4 to help un-tether from the generator and go back to our usual configuration. A quick check of the freezers showed no temperature variation so we could breathe easy knowing that we have a good plan in place.

The disruption was not nearly as long as we had originally feared but the middle of the night rousting left us rather bleary eyed the next day. We are grateful to our local electric Co-Op for their quick attention to this outage. In the past we would joke that we lost power if someone sneezed. West Oregon Electric has been spending a lot of effort to clear the lines where brush and trees have grown into and around the lines. It is one of the problems to deal with when the ground is fertile and nature grows in abundance. Outages are not nearly as common these days as in the past.

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