Lights-Out!

So, like much of the mid-Atlantic region, we received a lot of snow last weekend. When I say a lot, I mean A LOT. The snow, in and of itself, wasn't really bad. In fact, it could have been really awesome... but it had the unfortunate side-effect of knocking out power to our house, and about 200,000+ of our closest friends in Allegheny county. Not fun.

Our power blinked twice and then went out completely at around 10:30 PM on Friday evening. Despite the fact that we couldn't see any lights on anywhere and thus believing that someone else must also be reporting the outage, we did our duty and reported the outage to Allegheny Power. Thinking to ourselves that we'd be OK for the evening and that our power would obviously be restored by morning, we headed for bed. We were somewhat dismayed that our power wasn't restored when awoke the next morning, but it couldn't be that long before it was restored, right? Plus there's plenty of stuff to do, like shoveling out.

Here's the view that greeted me when I rolled up the garage door:

In case you can't tell, that's a lot of snow. A LOT OF SNOW. Here's my measurement:

The readings in the driveway ranged from 18 inches to 20 inches, but this is the one that I happened to photograph. It should also be noted that it only read a value that small because I had already shoveled 4 inches out of the driveway the night before. That means that by my measurement we got somewhere just shy of 2 feet of snow... and it had to leave the driveway.

Grandma RoRo had come down on Thursday night so that she could watch the kids on Friday while Lea went to work (and while Lea and I went out with friends on Friday night). As a result of the snow in the driveway (and the fact that when I went out to shovel in the morning, you couldn't even tell that there was a road at the end of our driveway), Grandma RoRo was trapped. So I set about shoveling the drive way. Well, about 3 hours and 100 cubic yards of snow later, the driveway was clear.

I started shoveling at around 9:00 AM on Saturday and it took three hours to shovel out the driveway, so obviously the power must have come back on by the time that I was done, right? Wrong! While we have a furnace that runs on natural gas, it doesn't run without electricity; as a result, the house was getting a might chilly. This made Lea nervous about the kids, so she started exploring our options.

Our friends Al (a.k.a. Uncle Al, bringer of sleds) and Maria didn't have power and neither did our friends Ken and Laura. Fortunately Uncle David and Aunt Mercedes did have power and were willing to take us in. So, with a clear driveway, we abandoned house - faucets dripping to help prevent the pipes from freezing. Grandma RoRo also left and headed for home.

Once we made it to Uncle D & and Aunt M's we got the babies settled down for a nap... and then, well, I don't know what happened, because I took a nap too. Upon waking we attempted to determine when our power would return. Allegheny power had a nice website with a map depicting the areas without power and estimates of when power would be restored - but no estimate for our area.

Grandma RoRo and Grandpa Greg offered to lend us their generator and my Dad offered to bring it down. Because it was getting late in the day, we decided to have Dad wait until the morning to bring the generator (and his know-how) - we also hoped that the power would be back on when I went to check on the house in the morning. With that decided, we settled in for the evening with Uncle D and Aunt Mercedes.

The next morning (it's now Sunday), I got up and headed back to our house. Because we hadn't had electricity when we left, I disconnected the garage door from the opener so that we could get the car out of the garage. After Lea had backed out, I closed the door and re-engaged the opener so that people couldn't break into our house by just lifting the garage door. I then left through a lockable door in the basement (for which I don't have a key). My plan being that when I returned I would just go in through the front door, to which I do have a key.

Well, I got to our house on Sunday morning and shoveled a path up to our door. Upon reaching the door, I attempted to open the storm door... and it doesn't move. I pulled a little harder (thinking that maybe it's just frozen in place) and it still doesn't budge - because it's locked. Thinking that maybe we forgot to lock the sliding door onto our deck, I called Uncle Al (who still didn't have power either) to see if I could borrow his ladder. Long story made short, the sliding door was locked too.

Thankfully Dad is pretty resourceful, and when he made it down to our house, he and I managed to work our way in without any damage to the house. We then got to work setting up our temporary power grid. Dad started un-wiring the furnace from the household power and I shoveled off the patio under our deck in preparation for accepting the generator. We then routed several extension cords through our laundry room window - one to the furnace, one to the chest freezer, and one upstairs to the kitchen for the refrigerator and some trouble lights. The slideshow below presents our little ad-hoc power grid:

With the generator in place and operational we were able to get the house warmed back-up to human-tolerable temperatures (when Dad and I got into the house, the thermostat in the living room read 37°F). This allowed Lea and the kids to return. We made dinner, put the kids to bed, and then we went to bed with the hope that the power would come back overnight.

Monday morning came, and we still didn't have power. By now Allegheny Power's website was saying our power should be back by 11:00 PM (and around 11:00 AM we actually saw trucks from the power company on our road). Laura had called earlier in the day and invited us over for dinner. However, by around 4:00 PM when we were getting ready to head out for dinner, we still didn't have power. Sad about our lack of power but happy to go see friends, we left for dinner.

The kids played, Lea did a load of baby laundry, and we had a lovely dinner. But, the time came that we needed to go home to put the kids to bed. On our way back we were on the look-out for signs that our electricity was back, but as we drove back our road all we saw were candles. We put the kids to bed, took care of some chores in the house, and I got ready to do the periodic maintenance on the generator (top off the gas, check the oil, etc.). Just as I was getting ready to step outside, the lights in the house came on. 8:30 PM - 70 hours after our power first went out.

Because a call to the power company earlier in the day revealed that many customers in our area had regained their power earlier in the day, only to loose it again a few hours later, we held off on our rejoicing. When the power was still on 2 hours later I decided that it was time to reconnect the furnace to the household power and put the generator away.

So ended one of our most stress-full weekends since before the babies were born.