My guess is that it’s very rare for a caller to have specific information on the cause of an outage, and it’s not worth tying up the operator’s time answering every call for those cases. On the other hand, they could provide a direct number only to the 911 operators (and the police and firefighters), so calling 911 might be the right thing to do.
Called in Tuesday afternoon. 5AM Wednesday morning got a text back that power had been restored. It wasn’t, had to call it in again, took another 12 hours before it was restored on the hottest day of the year.
ETA: Calling it in meant reporting it on the National Grid web app.
I’ll generally wait a little while to see if it comes back on; then, if it doesn’t, call a neighbor and ask if hers is out; if not, check my breakers in the basement; if no problem visible there, call it in.
These days calling in gets you a recording; though there is an option to give them additional urgent information if you’ve got some, which I assume would let you say “I can see a tree down on the line at X location”, or whatever. Sometimes the recording starts off by saying ‘there’s an outage and we expect to have it fixed by about Y:00’, sometimes it just takes your info.
Our provider has a way to report outages online. When you report it you get information on the cause, if known, and the projected time to repair.
We get that even when we don’t report it. First, “power is out, we’re looking into it.” Then, “estimated time to restore service is x.” Then, “we have restored service, if you are still without power, please let us know.”
Tying up an operator’s time? Where do you live? Mayberry?
Hell, I’m not sure I can remember the last time I called any business of any size and talked w/ a live human w/o fighting through a phone tree. So all they need to do is say, “Press 8 to report an outage.”
What was funny is that even though we could not report via phone, we subsequently received texts with wildly varying and inaccurate info as to the scope of the outage and expected duration.
By operator, I mean the person at the electrical utility fielding these calls. You were saying you wanted a way to convey the exact location of the outage and the best way to do so is verbally, to a person. How else would it work? Leave a voicemail message with the information? That’s going to be a long number of messages for them to work through, most of which have no useful information. I think the best approach is to ask the customer to call 911 (which is already staffed 24/7), give them the information and then have the 911 operator call the electrical utility.
On the app we can leave our customer number or phone number and last 4 SSN digits to identify us. They know our address and that’s what they’ll go by for the location.
Last time I reported an outage to the power company, it was for a specific street light. They handle those as well.
We always phone it in.
We do something vaguely similar.
Nighttime: Look out the window to see if the streetlights are on.
Daytime: Walk out to the street and look to see if the traffic signal at the end of the block is working.
I’ve never called one in, but outages here are rare. I was doing some maintenance on a home server and noted an impressive uptime: 690 days. It doesn’t use a UPS, so it’s been at least that long since even a momentary glitch. Even that one was probably not power related. The power has gone out a few times over the years but I can’t remember any of >30 min.
One of the best things about living in a neighborhood that has underground utilities is that it’s next to impossible for one house to lose power: if you’re out, likely hundreds of customers are out. This bumps you way up the priority list for fixing because the power company can fix one thing and cross hundreds of outages off their reports.
I report it. We are the only full time residents on our road. They might not know, and at least once it was a fuse on a poll that feeds our house.
Speaking from my experience working in a 9-1-1 center, yes we had a direct line to the control room at the power company where a real live person would answer the line. We needed it for possible urgent emergencies (e.g. A car crash knocked down a pole and there are live wires draped over a car. EMS needs the wires made safe before tending to the injured driver.) or sometimes information from a caller might inform how the power company wants to direct their resources. (Resident at 123 Smith St is dependent on a home oxygen concentrator - please keep this in mind when prioritizing repairs.)
We would get a few calls generally reporting an outage but with no specific information on the cause. We would advise those callers to report through the power company’s reporting system. If they could specifically report the location of a downed tree branch on a wire or downed wire we would pass that on to the power company.
Well, we called in within 5 minutes as it was down across the end of the drive artistically draped on my van and about 50 feet away towards the next property sparking away. 2 inspection visits by their guys and no estimation on when we will get power back. time before last the town was the last community to be restored and our road was the second to last road restored according to the first selectman. I had a friend come get me, I had an oncology consult I was not going to miss, it took my primary oncologist serious work to set up for sooner than 4 months away. mrAru is pretty cheesed off at the situation, they could at least move the damned wires so we can get out for water and fuel.
I’m sitting less than 300 feet from where underground utilities transition to above ground and these places are wired so that the outer walls can have power while the center wall is out or vice-versa. Whether our power goes out or not is a bit of a crapshoot.
One thing I didn’t see mentioned is to leave your porch/door light switch “on” so when the power comes back the utility workers can see when they drive through the neighborhoods who has power.
A lot of people around here have generators, which would foil this idea.
At work several years back the wires took a lightning strike taking out the power. We didn’t call in immediately but secured the plant. After an hour we found the number and called in to find out how much longer it would be as the ammonia refrigerant does not like to warm up. They had no reports of an outage. We were the only ones out. Our fuses and one transformer were the only damage and we are on our own line at that point .
I had decided to take the steps and not the elevator 10 seconds before the strike and was at the landing looking out the window at the time.
Sure, we call. Not if it comes back on in less than 15 minutes, but, if not, then we call. Not necessarily to report it, but so we can get an estimate on when it will come back on, and to make sure it’s not some payment processing issue with our bill.
We did this even before my mom was on oxygen, which now means we need to keep track of how much of her reserve oxygen she’ll need. Though, with that, we can also now request faster service–though I think the neighbors next door probably already had that.
(Though we do have an adapter that will let us run the oxygen machine off of the car battery, if necessary. Unfortunately, with that high of wattage, it has to be connected directly to the battery.)