Having a power outage for 30 minutes is a bummer… How about a power outage that lasts more than a week?!
Six months ago, my husband and I (along with 240 of our close neighbors) experienced a power outage at our home that lasted weeks (power went off for days at a time, then would come on for 5 minutes and then go out again for 3-5 days). Our food spoiled, our home was boiling hot and we were unable to ensure that our pets were safe and comfortable in the extreme heat we were experiencing in Arlington at the time. Now that it is cold out, freezing, in fact, what would be worse? Would you rather have the extreme heat and not have power, or to be in the freezing cold and not have power? I’ll take option C, none of the above. The experience from the summer and fall was ridiculous, expensive, uncomfortable and most of all, it showed us that our utility company was unreliable.
After writing several letters and speaking to numerous “supervisors” my husband and I decided had almost decided that we had done all that we could as the consumer. How do we gain awareness of the problem? The truth is that not all of the folks in our neighborhood had also experienced the same outage that our street had; this was because our strip of 240 homes was not connected to the same main grid of 10,000+ homes. What we were told over and over again by the “supervisors” was that our power company was all about the numbers. If the grid of 10,000+ homes had gone down, they would have taken priority over the 240 homes on our section. It
makes sense. I would much rather hear 240 people squawking than ten thousand. I get it. It was still a major bummer. Imagine how excited we were when we saw in the Arlington Citizen that our power company was making new underground transmissions and a whole new substation to manage power! This means that the improvements will enable our utility company to provide us with the reliable power that as paying customers, we all deserve! If you ever have trouble with your power, make sure you write a letter, and don’t stand idly by.
To learn more about the power substation improvements, keep posted on my Facebook page, and here on the blog.
