Crazy Spring - Covid, Power, and a Fire...

Crazy Spring - Covid-19, Power, and a Fire...

Covid 19 stuck my place of work on Wednesday, a worker tested positive for the virus, (I am working from home the last couple of weeks)  the plant is now shut down for 4 days now to deep clean the facility before anyone can go back to the plant.  Hopefully no more employees will be impacted by the event.  I sent my guys home for the remainder of the week, they can work from home.  We'll see what next week brings.

Rose and I were talking about a generator I was thinking about for the Camper, a unit smaller than the 6000/7000 watt unit we have for the house earlier today.  The 3500 watt unit would run the camper with ease, had electric start and was remote controlled.

Then we're sitting in the living room a couple hours later watching the news and without warning the house power goes out.  It was 6pm Wednesday night, within 20 minutes Eversource called and texted us to let us know they were aware we had no power.  Initially the messages said that by 7:15pm we'd have power back, we decided around 7pm to get the generator running just in case. It was a good thing we did, a little while later they said we wouldn't have power until after 9:30pm, then they pushed it out to 4:40AM due to downed trees they said.  Our generator will run about 10 hours on a tank on a medium load plugged in, so we should be all set until power is restored I thought.  We have to have the generator to power the fridge, freezers, etc. as we lose power a couple times per year, overnight generally, and one year for 10 days before we had power  restored.

Oddly enough after the power went out we went for a drive it smelled like someone was burning brush, thought it was our neighbor who frequently has his firepit going, a large ash fell by me as I walked out the door, Rose stepped on it as it hit the ground just in case. Rose thought maybe it was a house fire, I said it smelled like burning brush or a firepit. We thought nothing more about it until later.

Rose went out with the dogs for their last run of the evening about 8pm, I heard her talking to someone out front, turns out it was a fireman asking if we called the fire dept. No "we didn't", he said he was looking for Simon Farms Rd., that is our neighbor up the road Tony's place.  firetrucks and police cars were now driving by, flashing lights lit up the house in red and blue.  They all pulled up to Tony's house. appears it was a chimney fire they brought a ladder truck up.  We couldn't really go up there as its a one lane road that only services his house.  

Power came back on a 5AM this morning I'd turned the bedroom light switch on before I turned in so I'd know when the power was restored.  I threw on my slippers, and robe and went downstairs, opened the back door to go out and shut off the Generator and low and behold 1/2" of snow had fallen...  I shut down the generator, and proceeded to plug the Fridge and Freezer back into the wall outlets.  We don't have a generator disconnect so we power the house when needed with some extension cords, it works fine.

What a crazy night I thought as I poured a cup of coffee.