How's your neighborhood?

Photo by Diane Hettrick

By Diane Hettrick

How's your neighborhood doing?

The photo shows my street at about 10pm on Tuesday night, February 19, 2019.

This was the first day that my street was free of snow and ice. The yards are showing some patches of grass (or moss, actually) and I can see some of the boards on my deck although most of it is still a couple inches deep in snow.

On Friday, the school bus got stuck a few blocks away and had to be dug out by neighbors. As of yesterday, some people had not received mail for a couple of weeks.

The garbage truck came through today, for the first time in three weeks. They showed up at 6pm, well after it was dark, and two hours later than they have ever been. The recycling truck didn't make it.

Trees belonging to neighbors on each side of me dropped branches that bounced off the roof. Branches were 4 inches in diameter and around six feet long. One branch took down a wire. I called Comcast, who showed up promptly the next working day and cheerfully told me it was a phone wire, not Comcast.

I contacted CenturyLink on chat (don't have to worry about understanding heavy accents over the phone) and a rep set up a ticket to have someone remove the wire (which is wrapped around the branch). She said "Is there anything else I can do?" and I said, "Would you like to have my address?"

Since I haven't been a CenturyLink customer for years, she tried valiantly to pull up and verify my address in an old database. Long story short, I was cut off three times and left with a robot that kept sending cheerful messages about how someone would be back with me in a couple of minutes. This went on for an hour until I disconnected chat.

The very good news is that my power was only out for about three hours from 11pm to 2am one night. I was right in the middle of doing an edition. Not sure why it worked but I was able to get a message to Carl Dinse, who posted the power outage map (the one that showed Shoreline / LFP as solid red).

Otherwise not losing power was pretty amazing considering that my block (along with half a dozen blocks of LFP) is one of the few in the City Light system that lacks redundancy. If our power goes out, there's no other line to kick in and take over.

But it feels like life is returning to normal. And I'm willing to wait a really long time until the next snowstorm.