July 6, 2004
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Accident on MacArthur
When I finally decided to get up this morning, I walked over to the light switch and clicked it on. Nothing happened. I turned it off and then on again. Still nothing.
I walked into the next room, where my computer stuff is on another circuit. A status light was glowing on my monitor, showing that it was in standby mode. I tried to turn it on and the light went out. It was dead.
The whole house was without power. I walked outside and discovered why.
The whole street was blocked off. There were cops there and trucks from SDG&E (the power company), Cox (cable and telephone), SBC (telephone) and a heavy equipment rental. There was also a telephone pole shattered in three parts with splinters thrown fifty feet in all directions and there were lots of broken telephone lines littering the ground.
The heavy equipment rental truck was a tractor trailer rig with two cherry pickers on the trailer, positioned so their buckets overlapped, with the bucket of the larger cherry picker extending upwards over the cab of the tractor. It was large enough that, even when fully retracted, it caught the stainless steel support cable between the power poles on the south side of the street and a line of telephone poles running down a side street from the opposite side of the street. The support cable held but the pole was pulled out of the ground and snapped in two places.
The power lines run at the top of the power poles, with the communication services lines running below them. The jerk on the cable was enough to vibrate the power lines and blow their fuses. Replacing the fuses was a simple job and we had power back quickly.
We have our telephone service with Cox. They did not lose service.
When I checked a few minutes ago, SBC had brought in a new telephone pole, which they have not yet installed. They are stringing new phone lines first, to restore service to their customers. The police are gone, the people running around with cameras are gone, and the heavy equipment truck is gone. The road is open again, although traffic is restricted to a single controlled lane.
Things are almost back to normal.
UPDATE: SBC installed a taller telephone pole than had been there previously and they strung a new support cable higher than the old one had been, with the telephone lines strung above the support cable. They added a new anchor cable to the power pole on the south side of the street to support the additional strain of the higher connection and to prevent the power pole from leaning any farther across the street than the jolt caused it to do.
The trucks are all gone. There are no obstructions to traffic. Everything appears normal again.
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