the three t's

i was driving home last thursday night and was only minutes away from the house when the torrential downpour began. ker called me on my cell phone telling me she had never seen the traffic this backed up before and that the weather was completely spinning out of control. i immediately called work to give them a heads up of the sudden change in weather and nutty driving conditions that i was faced with. as i drove through the main street leading to the house, i freaked out by the depth of the water that had accumulated and how my mini was nearly covered in the feet and a half pool of rain.

almost 700K of puget's customers were out of power by late thursday night. it had been reported that this windstorm was far worse then was recorded back in 1993. no lights were on when i got home and it took nearly three days for the crew to restore the power in our area. thank god i had plans to be out of town. it would of been miserable to have been stuck here with absolutely no power - i would of gone nuts.

so it's wednesday now and about 100K customers are still without power. i was at work yesterday and was told that many executives are fielding phone calls at the call centre from severely irrate customers. i witnessed directly a well dressed elderly man walk up to our front desk at pse's headquarters demanding that he speak to someone about his power situation and refusing to leave until he did so. though the outage was caused by natural forces it makes you wonder about the basic human needs and how best we can function when things aren't as easily accessible to us.

so here's to the three t's in reference to the eastern seaboard outage that happened over three years ago. now that wasn't caused by an act of nature....moreso by miscommunication and units tripping in ohio and ny state (NOTE: can't blame canada). but what further escalated the widespread outage came down to: trees, (sagging) transmission lines and lack of training.

so in respect to trees and transmission in our pacific northwest situation...