Storm Stories

STORM!!   Flaggers love this word. $$$$ Hours and hours of working under extreme conditions, along with hours of sitting and waiting to go out with a crew, while a crew is repairing, moving, eating, sleeping. Extra clothes, extra food, catnapping when  you can.  This last big storm in western Washington had over 200,000 PSE customers without power. Many counties were impacted by this outage.  Thurston county was hit hard.  The train of repair consists of fixing one outage at a time. Mainly, one line at a time, as a homeowner will have a limb or a tree take down a local service line.  Day and night we proceed from one location to the next. My crew began out on Delphi Road near where MclaneCreek runs into Mud Bay. Bad corner on which a tree took down a local line, road closed, until the crew gets there and then we begin to flag traffic.  This was daylight.  Perilous location, crummy weather, but some cool Washington wildlife.  Cedar tree full of American Bald Eagles, dipping, soaring, perching. Why?  In a lull, I checked out the banks of Mclane Creek, which was lined on both sides with the carcasses of Chinook Salmon, which having responded to the ancient homing call, headed forth from the great ocean, returning to the small stream of their birth. This amazing journey from egg to death profoundly affects me.  This was the third time, I was out on this intersection in about a week, and I had noticed that smell of death, which meant life for the eagles.  We proceed along a series of stops, a hodgepodge of lines down in the rural domains.  Pitch black except for the rotating, flashing, oscillating lights on the Potelco trucks, and the flashing red beams of our traffic wands.  I love my wands, light sabers for The Flagger. We wear headlamps, and listen to the thump thump of generators echoing across the fields. That job done, we head to Tilley Road, a mainline to south county.  Here we have a magnificent wreckage of downed lines, poles snapped, tree limbs everywhere.  The foreman determines this is a job for the daylight.  New poles have to be trailered out to the site, transformers brought to the new location, Asplundh called out to cut up the debris. While semi dozing in the cab of my truck, parked at a permanently closed gravel pit, I happen to look up at the blazing heavens. Orion, bright and proud, with his faithful hound Sirius poised in his eternal bounding.  Alone in the night, we wait for daylight, to begin again. Helping to bring the light and warmth back to the cold and dark homes. 24 hours is my limit. Time to go home to the dogs. That adrenaline high pushes for just one or two more hours, but my friends are waiting, so home I go to feed and tend to the Siberians, and then, perhaps, to sleep.