Re: Power Restored!

[<dsavage@peaknet.net>]

> On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 04:48:38PM -0500, Kara Pritchard wrote:
>> The next round of storms will be here shortly however... Let's hope
>> they're a little nicer.
>
> Kara should have known better than to say that.  The next storm cut off
> 100,000 Ameren/UE customers in the St. Louis area.  We didn't have power
> for another 22 hours...

Glad you're back, and sorry you were down so long.  Makes my seven hours
sound like a minor inconvenience.  In all fairness to Ameren/UE, outages
like this have been very rare -- unlike Illinois Power of whom I've heard
frequent horror stories.  The last long outage a few years ago was caused
by a drunk driver with an uncommon ability to aim for a power pole with a
transformer rather than a mere tree.

My neighbors across the street were still without power this morning, more
than 30 hours after mine was restored. The Ameren/UE guys were there,
exhausted but still in fairly good spirits. One "powerless" neighbor
muttered how they were getting rich from all the overtime. One of the
linemen replied "That's true, but they won't let us go home to spend it."

Now, if anyone needs to replace any weak UPS batteries before the next
storm, I recommend Bell City Battery in Belleville. Figure on spending
about $16 each on standard 6V, 10AH sealed lead-acid batteries. Bel City
is also licensed to take your old batteries and recycle them properly.

--Doc



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