Those of you keeping track should be aware of my past two Offcuts entries, here and here. This is what happened after.

A few days ago, I was standing at the sink and saw a couple of very bright flashes from outside. I thought it was a car passing, but it wasn’t exactly sunny. A few minutes later, there was a knock on the door and I answered it to see a couple of guys in orange vests and hard hats. The one who knocked on the door looked like he’d seen a ghost.

“Do you have kids?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, “Why?”

“Do you know the power line is down back there?”

“Yes,” I said, “I phoned in about it twice.”

“Really? And they haven’t done anything about it?”

“Well, it got knocked down by the ice storm and I guess they’ve been busy.”

Turns out, he was with a company that had been subbed to replace streetlight heads. However, none of the streetlights on this street are currently working, so he went back there to see what the problem was. He said, “I saw the line on the fence and started to move a few things and it started to explode all over the place. So, your fence is live.”

“I figured it was.”

He had called into the town who then called the power company and another couple of guys in orange vests showed up. One of them told me the power would be off for a while. I said, “Ok. How long?”

“About an hour,” he said. He laughed a bit and said, “Some lady just tore me a strip down the street when I told her the power would be off. She was screaming at us, saying ‘What took you so long to deal with this?'”

“It’s not your fault,” I said.

“We just found out about it,” he said.

“I would’ve phoned in again to remind them, but my basement flooded and I didn’t want to lose power before it was dry.”

“I saw the pile of stuff on the other side of the house and down the street, too.”

“Yeah,” I said, “The house next door flooded and a house two doors past that. Maybe more.”

“Has anyone been back here cutting these branches?” he asked and pointed at the trees that tower over the power lines.

“Some guys made their way down the street a few months ago, but they didn’t cut anything in this yard or the next one. They did cut some stuff on the other side of the back fence, though.”

He said that company was under contract and should have cut the limbs which may have kept them from falling on the power lines.

Anyway, the power was off for an hour and they put the line back up on the pole.

The next day, fairly early in the morning, a truck showed up at the end of the driveway and a couple of guys with ladders and ropes went into the back yard and started trimming the branches off the trees. I went back and told them they could cut the entire things down if they wanted. They didn’t, of course. They did, however, clear away almost all the branches that fell in the yard.

So, all is safe and no one was electrocuted.