As many of you who are friends with us on Facebook know, there was a huge storm that swept through the Western Washington region on Saturday (August 29). We happened to be out and about at the Birth Center Picnic when the storm came through. Driving home, we saw many branches on the road and what should have only taken about 40 minutes, took us almost 2 hours to do because of all the limbs on the road and power out. We finally made it home and yes, we had no power either. Darrell hopped onto our utilities page to see how many people were out of power and when they thought we would have power back. According to our utility, due to the storm, they had 175,000 people without power. There were substations down, transmission lines down, and a lot of small residential lines. With the report Darrell saw, he figured we would be without for a few days. Our neighbors were pretty sure that we would have it back within 8 hours. We also walked around to see if there was any damage to our place since we live up against a greenland area. A tree just outside our dining area lost two branches, but with the way they fell, they only brushed against the house. If they would have fallen a completely different way, they might have ended up in Darrell’s office and we would be having a totally other blog post.
By the next morning, Darrell headed out to get ice for our fridge and freezers so that we could keep our food from spoiling. He had to head up into Everett for the closest store with ice. He came home and decided he needed some coffee only to remember that we only had coffee beans. So he did it rather old school with a mortar and pestle.
Other than that though, we were pretty set. We had just gotten a grill from Uncle Kenny in June when he moved, so we put it to some decent use during that time. We spent a good part of our Sunday out on our driveway with a bunch of neighbors (since there wasn’t much people could do inside their homes, we spent it outside) and we all brought some food to snack on and had a little dinneresque party. It was pretty nice.
Edward even enjoyed all of the quiet time and no lights. It took a couple days after the lights came back on before we could get him to take the headlamp off.
Overall, our power was out for 56 hours. We lost a few items, but not as bad as some others. It took almost a week before the utility company had every single customer back up. Makes me a little bit more appreciative of electricity.
