Ok, so I am at a remote house in rural WV. The power went out at 7pm last night. I called the power company. ETA restore 9pm. 9pm comes about. ETA 11pm. I go to bed. I wake up at 4 am with no power and call again. ETA 10am.
First, do they just make shit up? There is no storm or any other normal reason for power to be out (and for those wondering, I’m posting with 43 minutes left on my laptop battery on a dialup connection).
Second, with electricity being accepted as a normal fact of life, shouldn’t they get their ass in gear? Is 15 hours acceptable in the absence of a natural disaster for a customer to go without electricity? I got food in the fridge that is getting warm.
Or am I just, (as usual), being a dickhead about this?
The thing is, the company is probably trying to restore power to the most people as quickly as possible, so if they can repair one site and get power back on for 100 people, they’ll do that as opposed to working on a site that will only restore power for 15 people. And even if they ARE working on whatever is causing your problem, they might discover that there’s more damage than they thought. Sometimes the equipment is really so old that it’s held together with spit and chewing gum.
Or they could just be incompetent. That’s quite possible.
If this happens frequently, I suggest that you either get a generator, or move.
This is impossible to say without knowing why the power went out. Car hitting a pole? Squirrel getting fried in a substation? Super villain draining the grid in an attempt to deep fry a platypus?
I just went thru a 2 day power outage that affected 70% of the entire county. High winds brought down trees, blocking roads and severing lines Thursday night.
My first call to the power company (cellphone): “We cannot accept a trouble report at this time due to high call volume.”
12 hours later: “We have a trouble report in your area. We expect to have it fixed by 3PM Saturday.” (This was on Friday)
Saturday: “We expect to have it fixed by Sunday.”
Late Saturday: “We cannot predict when it will be fixed.”
Our power was finally restored Saturday night. A mile down the road, they endured only a 2 hour outage (different power company), so the level of service varies considerably.
It does seem like the power company, in spite of advance warning, didn’t bring enough people into the area to tackle the situation as we would have liked it to be tackled.
Here in the Chicago suburbs, we’ve had 3-4 prolonged power outages this past summer, typically lasting anywhere from a day to 6 days depending on where you live around here. High winds and intense storms do a ton of damage to power lines, and if transformers blow too, there are a bunch of things that could be wrong. They might get power fixed in one area and move on, only to have a damaged tree fall over later and take out more lines.
Typically power companies try to scout out areas and restore power first to the spots that serve high-importance regions (hospitals, senior citizens centers, other utilities), and then to the spots that will restore the most people at once. If your particular downed line only shuts down power to a relatively few houses, then you’re going to be last on the list.
So it could be that your power company is incompetent, or it could be that the power outage was really complicated to deal with. It’s hard to tell without knowing more.