Powerless
We arrived home to find that the electrical power has been down for just about half an hour. This entry is being made on a laptop using dial-up and a battery. We have just a rotary phone here so it took a while to get through the automated tree and report that which has already been reported by others. There’s no word on how widespread the outage is or how long it will take to be remedied. Did everyone arrive home early and fire up their air-conditioners all at the same time?
This report comes from close-in South Austin. There are some traffic signals out. The only trouble with no electricity, and it’s a lot of trouble, is that the refrigerator isn’t on. We just cooked and cooked and cooked this weekend to get ready for the work-week to come, so I truly hope that electrcity returns soon. Keeping the door closed keeps the fridge cooler longer, so it’s no ice cubes from the freezer for us.
Maybe I’ll go crank up the wind-up Y2K radio to see whether there’s any news other than what perambulating neighbors have to offer as they stroll by.
It’s rolling blackout time. Apparently, we can’t handle temps this high this early in the spring. It’s affecting traffic lights. The commute home should be fun.
News8Austin Story
Left out that they’re only supposed to last until 6pm.
The Statesman is reporting that maintenance also reduced capacity. Austin Energy should start using all the kindling they’ve been hacking out of people’s yards to fire the emergency plants for a few hours.
Apparently all the blackouts are in South Austin; ordinarily the plan might be to hit good old East Austin, but Guerrero Park is a touchy subject right now. Sheesh; you’d think that, if this is a planned thing, a little warning might be in order, especially for businesses relying on refrigeration. Nearly 6:30 and no power yet.
Two blackouts of about two minutes each in the space of an hour here in Bouldin Creek neighborhood…just long enough to shut down the server. Still trying to figure out how to get our site back up.
After 7 pm and everything’s still out here, with nary a flicker since it all first went out shortly after 4:30 pm
The lights could be seen returning in all directions; ours came on again at about eight o’clock, just as we, along with some neighbors, were finishing up the week’s supply of Sonoran pork stew and egg salad sandwiches made with Del Valle organic eggs from the Farm to Market along with a dessert of Blue Bell FudgSicle equivalents and every last ice cube in the freezer gone to cool bebidas, by the light of the kerosene lamp bought at Callahan’s General Store in preparation for Y2K. Now I guess we’ll have to eat lunch and supper out all week long. Luby’s, here we come.
That sucks. Sorry to hear you lost the lot. We didn’t lose power over here (Oltorf-Burleson-Ben White area), so it was just the traffic snarls for us. I-35 was a breeze for me (wish someone could explain why traffic is so light on Mondays during daylight savings but still a nightmare come Friday) but The Wife got caught at the light at I-35 frontage and Riverside. Apparently, Woodward and I-35 Frontage was completely closed down for a while.
It’s just that we had planned and cooked and laid in stores for a very, very busy week to come, visitors included, and then didn’t dare leave the food and didn’t want to waste it. Now the week’s rolling and there’ll be no time to redo stuff. Electricity in this house matters only for keeping food; if we’re in for a summer of this kind of occurrence, with no warning and no information available about duration of outages except the inaccurate, it’s not something to look forward to. Nothing electric matters in this household but the refrigerator but there doesn’t seem to be much point in relying on it to chill more than a day’s worth of provisions.