04 June 2008

Power Outages


I was just at a relative's house in Mt. Airy, and when the heavy storm hit, the electric went out for a few minutes. Not a big deal, and the kids actually liked it. But I just wanted to point out that if you live downtown, your power never ever goes out, not even for a split second. According to Mark, this is because of the redundancy in the downtown grid. This is especially true if your power comes in underground as ours does.

8 comments:

Kelly said...

I was at a party once in the far reaches of Clermont County, and the power went out in a moderate rain. The hostess, unfazed, pulled out dozens of candles and set them up all over the room. It was clear they'd been used before. When I left four hours later, the rain had stopped but the power still wasn't back. Amazing.

Anonymous said...

Blackouts, Disasters, Hurricanes, Tornados, Wind Storms. We’ve all seen the after-effects, entire communities without power. I’ve read that on average 3.5 million people lose their power in the US each week! We just bought a generator from MainPowerConnect.com that now will ensure our family has the power needed when faced with these unexpected outages. With back-up power, our home now stays well lighted, secure, keeping our food cold and fresh and our air conditioning working. Our generator will also keep the sump pumps running protecting us against flooding.

Radarman said...

City West, despite underground utilities, goes black often when the winds kick up. Duke Energy offers no explanation.

CityKin said...

Radarman, I don't understand why yours would go off, and mine wouldn't. I really would like to know.

BTW, Some co-workers today that live in Butler Co. told me they had to take cold showers this morning, because their power was off for 15 hours.

Mel G said...

Our power was out on Liberty Hill, just long enough to be fun. It kicked back on after about 4 hours, right after we bought ice for the cooler to keep the meat and dairy fresh. My hubby went to the Stop and Go on the corner of Sycamore and Liberty Hill for the ice. He said the two clerks in there were having the most hilarious conversation - maybe not for me to post in this comment section, but when he told me, I thought of your blog for some reason, and imagined you would definitely post the conversation as a fun convenience-store human interest story. We were just commenting on how we remember the power only being out one or two other times in the last 8+ years on Prospect Hill. So, we have a ripple effect for your downtown benefits, I guess.

dew said...

Odd you bring this up, as I just mapped Clark and Cutter streets in City West this afternoon for Duke.

City West is underground service, but there is overhead feeding most of it - and much of that overhead is old. Your problem lies there.

For you Washington Park folks, you are all underground, so you rarely have problems.

I'm on Broadway, and we were out too last night - and the bars were packed during those hours. Like a good snowstorm, power outages bring great community.

I kind of wish we had them more often...

Julie said...

My electricity was out briefly the other day-- couldn't get into the garage. However, it didn't last long at all.

CityKin said...

After these responses and doing a very little amount of research I have figured out that certain streets in OTR (the main N/S streets) are connected directly to the Central Businsess district distribution system, which is totally underground, safe and redundant. But most of my neighbors (even adjacent buildings) get their power from single sourced poles located on side streets which are subject failure in electrical storms.