No power

Got home tonight at about 7pm and noticed the street light near our house was out. After I picked up the mail it dawned on me that our porch light was also out. Our neighbor to the east had lights so I figured this was one of those rare times it didn't turn on. However, it also didn't turn on when I flicked the switch. Our neighbors across the street, their neighbor, and the neighbor to the west didn't have power either, but all the other houses seemed to.

All the houses without power were fed off the same pole. Called it in, but it seemed to take a while to convince the person who answered the phone at City Light that there was a problem.

"Did you check the breakers in the house?"

"Yes, they're on."

"On?  Or off and then on?"

"They never tripped."

"Did you hear any loud noises just before the power went out?"

"Actually I just got home and found the power already out."

"You're sure you didn't hear any noises just before?"

"No, the power was already out when I got home."

"Is there anyone else in the house who may have heard noises?"

I assured her I was the first person home and didn't hear anything. This was also after she convinced herself that we weren't part of the Shoreline power problem (which was a good 50 blocks away from us). Yep, she was just trying to do her job, and no doubt City Light gets many calls from people who really have some other problem. However, it seemed she was geared towards my call not being a new outage which needed to be reported.

Melody returned home not long after I got off the phone and we ate home made noodles at Chiang's Gourmet Chinese. We didn't order much since we figured it'd be better to not take home leftovers.

City Light repair truck

When we turned onto our street we saw flashing lights, which we took as a good sign. The two houses in the picture were also affected, and I was so busy taking pictures I didn't notice that their lights turned on between shots. Our power was restored in under 90 minutes from the time I reported the problem, which seems pretty good especially considering they had 3,000 houses without power in North Seattle/Shoreline. I guess it helped that the problem could be localized to one pole.