Back in Business
LeAnn posted this blog on Monday, October 18th, 2010 at 12:11 am
Well, at least we don’t have a big electrical cable running from the pole across the yard to the house anymore.
It all started a week ago Wednesday when I came home from a meeting and Randy informed me that we only had electricity on one side of the house.
One side of the house?
Yes, only one side of the house. The lights worked in the dining room and kitchen but the refrigerator and stove were out. No lights in the living room or bedroom. My fluorescent light for the plants in the basement was working, but no overhead lights. No water heater. The freezers were working, though.
And the funny thing was. . .none of the circuits were blown.
Even though it was after 9 p.m., I decided to call an electrician that we know. He knew immediately what it was — that we had either lost one of the mains or it was shorted out underground. He told me that a few lights would be all right but not to do anything that required large amounts of electricity, such as the furnace, hot water, the stove — those kinds of things. Anything that drew large amounts of electricity could create “hot spots” that could start a fire. He said he would be out at 7:30 a.m.
True to his word, the electrician showed up at 7:30 the next morning. He pulled the cover off the meter and immediately knew it was on the electric company’s side and not our side. He called the electric company (a rural cooperative) and a crew showed up an hour later.
They said the electrical service had shorted out underground, somehow. So, they hooked a cable up to the pole and ran this big electrical cable across the yard to the house. And that’s what we had for electricity for a week, a big cable across the yard.
This past week, they came to dig in some new cable for us. I thought it was going to be like when they dig in phone cable — you can’t hardly see where they’ve been, just a thin line in the dirt.
Boy, was I wrong.
When I came home one day from the newspaper office, I immediately knew they had been there to dig in the cable.
The yard was a huge mess. It’s got big track marks in it everywhere. Not tire marks. But big iron-cleat type track marks. They drove over one of my little lilac bushes I just planted. They dug up one of my little cedar trees. They threw the cable over onto another of my cedar trees and bent it over. Fortunately, the foot-and-a-half high tree didn’t break off. (The tree is big enough so it wasn’t like they couldn’t see the tree there.) They also dug up a couple of the rose bushes I planted along the edge of the yard this spring.
The worst part, however, is that they completely messed up our brand new contoured and excavated drainage. We had an excavator come in and install window wells and then slope the dirt away from the house so the water would drain away from the house and to the driveway and down the hill. After that big rainstorm in August when we ended up with a sink hole on the west side of the house, we decided we needed to do something about the drainage.
We’ve had enough rain since then to know it was working perfectly. But now there are humps of dirt all over the place that will mean we’ll end up with a big puddle right in front of the house when rains — and a big skating rink in the spring when it starts the freeze-thaw cycle. The water is not going to be able to drain where it needs to anymore with those piles of dirt in the way.
They also dug up quite a lot of the brand new grass that Randy planted and then spent a large amount of time sprinkling straw over it to keep the grass seed in place. The grass was just starting to grow, too, so it didn’t look so bare in back of the house. And now an awful lot of that new grass is gone.
I called the cooperative to say that I was not very happy with the mess that was left in our yard, especially since we just had someone in to do the excavation and the contouring. The lady was very nice about it and said they would send out a restoration crew. She said she would call to schedule a time when they could come. They haven’t scheduled anything yet, so we shall see what happens.
It’s like my dad always used to say about farming — it’s always something. . .
LeAnn R. Ralph
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