Arcin' and Sparkin'

Yesterday my wife called me while I was driving home. It seems there was an electrical problem and power lines were arcing and sparking in the back yard. I arrived home to find that a limb from my back yard neighbor's pecan tree had shorted out on the 8 kV feed. In addition, it had burned the lines feeding my house. The limb was hanging and on fire.

I made a call to Entergy and punched the "3" option to signify an electrical emergency. After all, they had a line shorting out on a tree. The tree and ground around it could have been energized. I immediately told the operator that this was an emergency involving live power lines in a residential area. I might as well have been talking to my hand. They had to go through their entire list of questions before telling me that they would report my "outage" and that someone would be there within an hour or so. "NO", I told him, "this is an emergency - you need to get someone here ASAP. There are live wires arcing and sparking." No use, the operator could have cared less. As far as he was concerned, this was an outage that required no unusual measures.

In the meantime, my other neighbor had called the local fire station. They, of course, could do nothing with live wires about. A deputy showed up and went around the neighborhood to warn folks to stay inside until the problem was fixed. Since we didn't have any power, my wife and I decided to go out to eat. When we returned about 2 hours later, the repair crew was on site and had finished half of the splice required to fix the wires - and trimmed the tree. I don't know whether they had responded to my call or if our fire department had brought them out.

The lesson, our public utilities hire idiots to work the phones so if you see something dangerous happening, just run the other way!