Let there be light...

Well, we had a little excitement on the job. My father and step-mom were coming in from Seattle for their first visit in over five years. (Too bad the timing was off by a few months and they have to stay in our basement, in the midst of a construction zone, rather than a nice guest apartment of their own, but we can't have everything.) The second evening after they arrived we noticed that the electricity was acting funny. The lights were fluctuating every few minutes, with most wavering between normal and quite dim, but our dining room fixture was inexplicably about 3 times as bright as normal. Lights would turn themselves on and off. The microwave was making a funny noise, and the toaster was barely toasting. When we tried to run the clothes washer at the same time as the dishwasher, it groaned and wouldn't spin. Our cable and internet were also down (hence no updates for the past couple of days).

There were only two possible explanations: (a) our house was on the site of an ancient Indian burial ground, and the construction had disturbed the spirits who were bent on wreaking revenge, or (b) something had gone awry when they poured the concrete the day before and our power lines had been damaged.

So we informed Wagner as soon as he showed up the next morning, who said "you should've called me last night!" and immediately got an electrician on site. We also got the cable and internet guy out. They're not sure what exactly happened or why, but apparently a "grading spike" (whatever that is) damaged the power line. The mystery is why it didn't simply knock the power out completely. So then they called out the KU (Kentucky Utilities) people. According to Wagner, we lucked out in getting the *only* KU crew left in Lexington today (the rest were still helping to repair downed service from Hurricane Ike in Louisville). We lucked out further in that they had the *only* machine in Lexington that could "listen" to a buried power line and figure out where the damage occurred. Our whole neighborhood lucked out even further, because during their trouble-shooting they discovered that the transformer on the utility pole behind our house was badly deteriorated (a problem that apparently was unrelated to our current difficulty), and they said it was "good we got called out" because "the whole neighborhood probably would've lost power soon."

The fancy power-outage-divining machine was able to locate pretty much the exact spot where the buried power line had been damaged, and fortunately it did not involve having to dig up the concrete footers that had been poured the day before. Phew. Even *more* fortunate, it turns out that the excavator had hit the neutral line (there are 3 lines buried, two that carry 120 amps? volts? something? each, and one that is neutral). Had it hit one of the two charged lines instead, we would've lost all power completely and the worker could have easily been killed. I don't want any deaths on my conscience as a result of this job, so that was a HUGE relief.

So as it was, we were only without power for about 5 hours while they identified and fixed the source of the problem. Then when they got the power back on I had to call the cable guy back to fix the cable/internet. Apparently the power line problem fried the cable splitter, something which the cable guy said "I've never seen it do THAT before." Always nice to be first at something.

The good news is that the power problem so distracted Wagner that he did not notice that Jon and the kids had snuck out onto the construction site (without my knowledge, because I would've put my foot down and not allowed it) and written their initials in the concrete before it hardened.