I had just cranked up the oxygen concentrator and cracked open the valve on the propane bottle yesterday when the power went poof! 9:30am and no electricity.
All those words that spilled out of my mouth when the concentrator's alarm, with its irritatingly high pitched squeal, dragged my creative motivation right on out with them. I flipped the switch, bled the propane lines and trudge about the house flipping the battery backup switches to stop their squeals and went to check to see if maybe, just maybe the load of clothes in the washer had gotten to the end of the cycle.........yeah, right.
I phoned the emergency number for WAPA......a side note here, it is wrong, wrong, wrong, when you know the emergency number for your local electric company, just wrong I tell you!...... and of course no one answered. But I noticed as I made my way through the "press 1 for.." menu that there was something new....a press 6 for an important message from WAPA. I figure this can not be good, so I press 6 as instructed and my already drooping spirits crash & burn. There is a pre-recorded message giving a time of just 10 minutes earlier saying that the plant was experiencing problems and then a list of feeders that were off....I was of course on one of the 5 listed. But the scary part was that the message was timely! We don't do timely in the Caribbean! Timely is frightening! Timely made me wonder if we were on a planned outage. Planned outage was not good. Then I started trying to remember when I had seen the WAPA barge last. I usually see the barge go by early every morning....but I hadn't seen it on Friday...I hadn't seen it Saturday morning either. Unfortunately the oil refinery has put WAPA on cash in advance for barge loads....72hrs in advance.... so the barge not passing is not a good sign.
By 11:00 yesterday with the power still not on, I decided that it was time to go down to the beach bar and see if anyone knew what was going on beyond the canned info available and to pick up some ice....just in case.
The gas pizza oven was turning out pizzas and the beer was cold.....life was looking up. Sat there and had a couple of beers and some pizza. Even the showers that were blowing (and I do mean blowing, as in sideways...roof overhead doesn't help much) through, the fringes of Hanna didn't matter. There was a bar full of us just hanging out, waiting for WAPA to do whatever it was going to do. About 2:00pm the fan over the bar started to hum and turn slowly. The power was on!
Not trusting that all was well, I still picked up the ice. When I got home sure enough, things were back to normal. The washer had finished the load by the time I got there, so I threw them in the dryer. I phoned the emergency number to see if there was a new pre-recorded message saying that other feeders were out....because if they were, we were on power rotation! But no...the new pre-recorded message was that all feeders were back online. What is going on??? Efficiency is frightening!
But just about the time I started feeling really comfortable that all was well with the power gods...POP! And from about 3:30 until almost 7:00pm we were down again! The clothes did get dry before we lost power again! This time it was just something up here on the ridge, not the plant or the whole feeder....lucky us!
In all of this I have to say that we have the best line department in the world. Those guys show up to try to tie this piece of crap distribution system back together regardless of the weather, day or night. They are my heroes! I love the WAPA guys! Their equipment sucks, the system is a mess, the plant is antiquated but those guys work magic!
So here it is Sunday........the power is still on.....but I didn't see the barge this morning...so that's 3 days in a row. Either the barge is running on a different schedule or we might not have power for long. I'm keeping my fingers crossed on a new schedule!
Just another day in paradise!
My power issues are minor in the whole scheme of things....Gustav was just a little wave when he passed us, Hanna has been nothing but a few showers. My thoughts are with the people along the Louisiana coast. WAPA outages are an inconvenience, Gustav has the potential to be much, much more.
Good luck to everyone along the Gulf Coast and those inland!
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