The Hurricane Unknown to the World, Day 4

Wednesday, December 3, 2007

7:30am. The wind storm is officially over, but the power is still out almost everywhere (even some of the power is out again where they had it going last night,) phones are still out. The utility crews are working hard. You see trucks everywhere--its quite reassuring.

The telephone company discovered four breaks in their fibre optic cable ring that connects us to the outside world. The fibre optic ring is designed so if it breaks, the signal goes back the other way, so service isn't disrupted. However with the four breaks, both routes were cut-off.

The kids have been troopers through it all. Even though there is no school for the rest of the week and they get antsy, they are actually better behaved with the power off! Although at night they tend to get more impatient with the power outage.

Off to work.

6:00pm. The challenge for work today was how to process payroll without power. We were determined to make it happen this week even if we had to write the checks manually. Direct Deposit is out because that has to be submited online two days before payday...which would be today. Our payroll clerk is calculating time sheets with an abacus...Ok, actually its a plain calculator.

One of the group homes bought a generator with some of their savings so we decided to try taking the server to that group home and entering payroll in the accounting system with the generator power. We took the single-desktop computer uninterupted power supply (ups)to regulate the unsteady power from the generator. It worked amazingly well!--and the battery back-up was useful more than once. Payroll went much quicker than the nightmare thought of doing it all by hand.

So our payroll person hung out at the group home entering payroll directly on the server and I hung out at the office opening the three-days worth of mail and being available when we needed odds and end information from the office for payroll.

While I was there one of the office staff people we hadn't heard from yet came to check on us. We were glad she was alright.

The director and associate director went to run errands to all the homes, such as the heaters that were picked up in Portland yesterday.

With all the running around, I concluded I had to get gas. Earlier that day, it was reported that Fred Meyer was hooking up generators to their gas pumps and had a couple truck loads of gas lined up to make there was enough for everybody. I waited in line for a half anhour to get gas which actually surprised me because the lines at a very few other gas stations I saw or heard about (running with generators) were several blocks long.

As I was coming home after a full day, I noticed the street light start to glow. To my joy the power came back on!! That was a relief because our freezer already had stuff dripping down the fridge from melting, the big freezer was reaching the end of its ice age, and the frozen turkey we put in the fridge to keep it cool was getting thawed out pretty well. I got home to lights on in the kitchen...and the phone rang.

It was from a family friend in Vancouver! The phones were working again! It was nice to have contact with the world again! When our director went to Portland yesterday, they made a few calls to family in Vancouver for us so they would know we were alright.

After reporting on how well we were doing, the lights flickered, got really dim and went black. My middle son and I went outside and saw bright blue-ish light flash from behind distant trees, then we heard an long electric growl--must be a transformer blowout. When you start a vacuum the lights in your home flicker the instant its turned on, perhaps with thousands of electrical appliances starting all at once when the power came it overloaded a transformer. I don't know how it all works, but that's what I imagine. Seeing and hearing the electrical explosion instantly gave me respect for the power of those quite electricity lines running overhead along the roads.

So our power was out again. It felt like dangling on a yo-yo--just get our hopes up after 3 1/2 days without power and then within an hour its out again. But there was still hope because one block away from us the street lights still dotted the roads and the glow from the Fred Meyer vicinity was glowing.

9:00pm. After the power went out, some friends of ours decided to visit family in the Portland area and let us borrow their generator. We tried it on our freezer for about five minutes, but the fumes and the noise disturbed us too much so, we decided to go to Fred Meyer to try our luck getting ice.

It was refreshing seeing a somewhat normal visit to the store. Although they had generators during the storm, Fred Meyer still pulled all of their freezer/fridge items and put them somewhere. I don't know if they locked them in a freezer to stay cool or if they had to throw it out, but when we got there they were beginning to restock the frozen foods. Not surprisingly, the ice was gone.

This visit was different than what my co-worker described her experience when she went on Monday. She said people were animals. I guess when you're paniced and not prepared, your more willing to compromise your ethics and courtesies. I don't know, but it makes me want to be prepared all the time, so don't have to be at the mercy of panic and its thoughtless compromising.

While we were there, we ran into one of our fellow church members. We exchanged reports on how we faired the storm. They lost all of the trees on their lot and one tree pierced their roof..fortunately, not a whole lot. They were still without power or phone. Gratefully, the friends who let us borrow their generator also let us borrow a cell phone on the only cell phone service that's been active throughout the week...and only at certain hot spots (Fred Meyer was close to one of them). She was able to call home for the first time all week to let her family know they were alright.

Shortly after we got home, the power came back on again! I called our bishop to give him a status report on our contact with fellow church members.

We went to sleep without the Kerosene heater, candles, and we were out of glow sticks!