March 1, from the data-driven, unexcitable Capital Weather Gang: “On Friday and Saturday, a powerful storm will lash the Northeast with destructive coastal flooding, wind and heavy snow. It is shaping up to be the most destructive nor’easter of the season, perhaps the most destructive in decades for some along the coast. The National Weather Service is calling it a life and death situation along the coast.”
March 2, a Friday, the mid-Atlantic had the first in a series of three nor’easters (update: at time of publication, four), storms that barrel down the coast from the northeast looking like a sort of cold-weather hurricane. The Northeast has been whacked with exactly what was forecast, the mid-Atlantic has been getting off easy (update: at time of publication, not getting off easy). What the mid-Atlantic was getting – and got in excelsis on March 2 — is wind.
Local CBS affiliate: High wind gusts are being reported of 69 mph in certain parts of Maryland. The gusts will be the strongest around noon on Friday. The wind has a sustained force at 30-40 mph across the region but isolated wind gusts could reach 80 mph.
The shutters rattled, the birdfeeder went sideways, trees across the street bent by 45 degrees, from 12:00 over to 2:00. Sure enough, 5:19 p.m., came the BANG with which I am well-acquainted, the BANG of the transformer at the top of the alley blowing up. BANG. Call the local power company, Baltimore Gas and Electric, BGE.
March 2, 2018 – With wind gusts exceeding 60 miles per hour in the BGE service area still expected this afternoon and evening, it is likely additional outages will continue to occur. Based on the number of customers affected, this is the worst storm to impact the BGE region since 2012.
I have a landline and sneaky ways of getting to talk to BGE customer service, who used to be in indirect touch with crews who would fix your transformer but now, I think, just reads information off the website. Trying to find out what’s going on with the crews is now like being in an airport or train station and the arrivals are late, later, never coming, no way to know, nothing to do but wait and trust the corporate entities you don’t trust.
March 3, a BGE truck is in front of the house, not where it needs to be but oh glory, it has a guy who knows about transformers. It might not be as simple as one transformer, the BGE guy says, it might be something farther up the line. Anyway the bucket trucks can’t work around wires in this wind. No Estimated Time of Restoration, ETR as we say.
March 4, Sunday, two days later, I use precious laptop juice and log into my BGE account.
March 4, 2018 – More than 435,000 outages occurred due to high sustained winds and gusts exceeding 70 miles per hour. The vast majority of customers are expected to be restored by tonight with final repairs to pockets of more heavily damaged areas continuing into mid-week.
I am apparently in one of those pockets of more heavily damaged areas. Still no ETR. A neighbor snarls, “I don’t believe anything they say.” I am eating dinners out with friends – cooking and eating in the dark and cold is sub-optimal – then entertaining myself in the evenings by going to bed at 8:00, under as many blankets as I have, and I have a lot.
March 5, 2018 – While outages continue to decrease, the pace of the number of customers restored will be slower than during the first few days of the storm. Once completed, these jobs are likely to restore service to smaller groups of customers at a time – in many cases only a single customer. Specific restoration times will be available to customers through BGE’s outage reporting channels.
BGE’s outage reporting map: click on a little triangle near your house and this comes up:
First reported March 2, estimated restoration March 6?
No, wait, what does that say? Probable cause: wildlife. WILDLIFE?
This wind was historic, it had already gone on for days, it was still going on. It blew the Potomac River dry, a goddam big river and the wind blew the water out, you could see the bottom, the Capital Weather Gang said this is called a blowout and it is “a little end-of-times.” And some dumb little outage map expects me to believe this is WILDLIFE? I check it again.
Apparently so. Notice the Estimated Restoration moved ahead two days. By now, I was staying out of my house and in my office building as long into the day as I could. I googled Wildlife, Probable Cause of Outage. You bet: monkeys, snakes, geese, raccoons, and most of all, squirrels.
Squirrels run across electric wires. I picture the kind of squirrel that thinks it can roll a cigarette with one hand on horseback in a high wind, racing along a wire on its toenails, getting hit by a 67 mph gust, blowing into the transformer, and as I said already, BANG!
Squirrel-related outages have their own website with a zoomable map covered with little red pins. As of 1/31/2018, squirrels have caused 1,141 outages, almost double the #2 cause which is Birds, so many outages that the website suspects squirrels of purposeful behavior and in fact of being foreign agents which means, it says, 1,141 would be an underestimate: “There are many more executed ops than displayed on this map however, those ops remain classified.” By comparison, only three outages worldwide have ever been caused by nation-state cyberattacks. To support its view, the website quotes a certified spy:
“I don’t think paralysis [of the electrical grid] is more likely by cyberattack than by natural disaster. And frankly the number-one threat experienced to date by the US electrical grid is squirrels.” – John C. Inglis, Former Deputy Director, National Security Agency 2015.07.09
Finally, on Wednesday, March 7, a few hours before BGE’s self-inflicted deadline and after five full days of early dark and long underwear and praying for strength to my prairie grandmother who farmed before the grid, the power came back on. I heard yelling outside and went out — the wind was still blowing — and a neighbor said, “Can I hug you? I have to hug somebody!”
Earlier that day, I’d driven out looking for BGE trucks and found seven of them clogging a little nearby street with big equipment. “What happened,” I yelled at a guy in a truck. “Trees fell over on lines,” he yelled back, “blew out a transformer.”
Oh. I didn’t ask him about his company’s wildlife hypothesis. I could have asked, I’m a certified journalist, I could have tried to reconcile all this conflicting information, could have turned it into a coherent and rational story of how power goes out and gets turned on again, could have provided a tiny beacon of light in this era of contradictions and suppositions and unverifiable reports and outright lies.
I didn’t, I was tired, I just drove away. If you ask me why the power was out for five days, I’m saying squirrels.
_______
Quotes edited for length only.
Woodcut, A Prairie Windstorm by Paul Frenzeny and Jules Tavernier, May, 30, 1874; via Wikimedia Commons