With The Lights Out
Yesterday I returned to the neighborhood to discover the entire area without power. The main grocery store remained open with generators providing power to the cash registers, coolers, and just enough lights to give the appearance of a cheap horror flick. Early in the day a cement truck had struck a power pole and made a big mess of the neighborhood, but that was cleaned up quickly and power was restored, only to have 9000+ houses lose power again at about 3:30 pm for an unrelated reason (however, at the time we didn't realize it was an unrelated incident and everyone assumed there were some issues with rewiring the first accident.) Here's the Seattle P-I article about the outage.
The power came back on just before 6 pm for about thirty seconds, followed by an exceptionally loud explosion like a cache of M-80s being detonated all at once and everything going dead once again. I rushed to the back porch expecting to see a transformer on fire, but instead saw a large tree in the thickets smoking with ash fluttering around. Neighbors said they had heard similar noises after two earlier attempts to restore power but no one had identified the source until this time because numerous other trees blocked the view from the street.
Here's the offending tree. That's an approximately 75-foot tall wild cherry tree, which was leaning against three uninsulated high-voltage lines that run down the hillside to the street below. There's no road or pathway there - just lots of briers, raspberries, creeper vines and trees.
You can almost smell the burnt leaves and bark.
About twenty minutes later (after spending a fair bit of time trying to find a phone book to look up the City Light phone number) a utility truck came driving down the street and we were able to wave them down and point out the source of the outage. Read on for lots more pictures about their efforts to get the tree out of the way.
Here's an attempt to give some perspective about where the tree is in relation to our deck. The tan spot in the extreme lower right corner of the picture is our deck railing, and I'm shooting this picture looking slightly downward. There is one house between ours and the right-of-way where the tree is located. The tree is just about midway between the two blocks.
By the time all was said and done at least six City Light trucks were parked up and down our tiny one-way street (and all facing the wrong direction! Apparently city vehicles feel they can ignore those sorts of direction signs since fire trucks have also driven down our street the wrong way twice in the past six months, too...) The workers had several conversations with neighbors and each other regarding the best way to actually get down there and get at the tree. In the end they went down the stairwell that leads to the back door of a neighboring house, and then blazed a trail from there through the thicket.
The first thing they did was extend a remarkably long pole with a saw (I think?) at the top in order to clear some small twigs off of a sturdy branch in the trunk. The pole appears to have been about fifty feet long, and quite flexible.
Next they tossed a thick rope around said branch and draped it over to the other side. One of them must have been a former rodeo cowboy since they nailed it on the first throw! They then used the pole to guide the rope into a crevace.
To give some idea of scale, here's a zoom-in on the crew beneath the tree, which were visible as small colored dots in the underbrush at the bottom of some of the other pictures.
After a little finessing, the rope was in position and a slipknot was tightened around a thick bough. A few moments later the sounds of a chainsaw could be heard working their way through thick wood.
With a sudden crack and a crash, the tree fell into the brush. The thickets surrounding are so thick you can only see the cracked remains of the trunk. Apparently the tree had rotted out, and with the string of dry, windy weather we've had recently it was weakened to the point where the trunk failed, causing the upper canopy to lean into the wires. A little work with the chainsaw and a few good tugs and the tree was down.
The crew did a little further sawing to clear a path back out of the brambles, but the tree was basically left where it fell for nature to take its course. Power was restored a little after 8 pm, and neighbors who had been drawn outside by the noise and activity returned to their respective homes.
NaNoWriMo 2007
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