Eek... so much for visions of a comfy Saturday. (Quickly quickly to wash hair, make more coffee, fill the sink for dishes, boil some water into thermoses, coffee into thermal carafe, some eggs on to hard boil, pot of porridge on to get a start, firewood in and fire started - our heat is electric otherwise, wet hair to be brushed while there's still a light and a mirror... computers and UPS's turned off)
This all came about because this fall Hydro was by, many many times, trimming trees on the crossroads, and muttering vile "chop 'em down" noises. Even though our trees in question are mostly spindly little weed trees that are still years and years from being a threat, but provide some small insulation between us and a gravel road of ever increasingly fast and heavy traffic.
However, Larry next door does/did have some bigger nicer trees that had their chainsaws revving up.
In fact, Larry actually had someone come and relocate a blue spruce in his yard to try and save it from the chop.
In the midst of all this though, it eventually came to light that all our poles and wiring weren't placed to current standards. Well, actually, neither are our houses. Larry lives in the old church. We live in the old church shed. Both were built on land donated to the church, early in the 20th century, before poles and wires were the in-thing.
And for some reason, when they actually did run electrical support through the hamlet, they don't appear to have been looking at today's guidelines for clearance. (Odd, that.)
Anyway, someone realized that if our power poles were actually on the other side of the road, this would fix things. So, in the fall, all golden and lovely, some marker stakes were placed, and everyone agreed to let everyone know what was going on next...
Which brings us up to 8am on December 13th, when Wareham is buried under the most snow it's had by that date in a really long time, and it's danged cold. And without warning here they are....
This is the Before picture. Our power pole as viewed from my studio window. It's situated snugly between the two properties, well back from the road, and down in a hollow. (Many years ago, they raised the level of the road, and there's now a fairly steep drop from road level, down to where the building sits. In spring, summer or fall, you can see this drop in elevation, and that we've ended up building a terraced garden from the road height, down to what's *our* ground level, with a small bit of patio, and a tiny ornamental pool for Darrell's latest fountains or decorative iron work. Right now it just looks a bit like a large snow drift, and there's no real way to tell when you've got to the bottom.
Peeking over towards Larry's place, where they've attached to *his* power pole, and are starting to work on it, jiggling it loose?
And over across the road to the east, where they have to turn us all off, and cut our wires free. (Because of course, we're now going to be talking of different lengths of cabling needed, since all the attachment points are moving...)
Out the studio window again, the Hydro fellows in their snowsuits are starting to disconnect our transformer and dismantle our pole, while beyond them, across the road, the existing pole, which only carried a wire across to the Southern neighbours, now needs to be replaced with a pole to hold the transformer...
And there they start raising the new pole into place...
And re-attaching the transformer.
And then they're back over to my pole, to start chopping it down. They're having to work from above, because of the snow, so this limits the ease in doing it. The shot is a bit blurred, and my focal point a bit confused. I snatched the shot without much preparation when I realized what they were about to do. While hovering, the guy now holding the chunk o' pole, had used a chainsaw to cut through the pole, then before it could topple, the cherry picker (do they call them that at Hydro?) had to quickly move up a bit, so he could grab the section, and they could swing back and lower it to the ground.(On the second chunk, he missed it 'by that much' and the section of pole crashed to the ground below, fortunately missing the building, or anything particularly noisy down below. We probably won't be able to tell for sure until we can make our way through all that snow to over there.)
Ah yes, a parting shot... The whole endeavour was to prevent them cutting more trees. But of course the new replacement pole was by a tree they've never been able to 'have at' before... Why not a quick bit of seasonal tree trimming before going away?In the long run, the power went off at about 10:03am, and came back about 2:55pm. Could have been worse. They also could have done it at a smarter time of year. But the fellow explained they had a huge number of poles to replace, all before the end of the year (and budget.) And it didn't matter what it cost Hydro in overtime... So these fellows all just bundled up intheir snowsuits and came trudging out to do it, even thought they agreed that someone up the food chain was an eejit.
