Storm Damage!

Yesterday evening's wind and the blowing dust finally slacked off a bit and we could occasionally hear rain drops. As we were getting ready for bed, (Forry was already undressed...) I thought I heard someone yelling. After I put my shoes on and went outside, I could hear voices from over by the lane (Auntie Violet is parked by the windbreak about 200 feet from the lane) and lots of high bright lights. I hollered at Forry to come out and see what was going on. He quickly realized that linemen were over working on one of the electric poles. They had three lit-up trucks over there, one with a big bucket. As we watched, they brought down the bucket, turned their rigs around and left. When we went back inside, Forry checked and sure enough, we were running on battery power, Power flowed from the batteries through the inverter as the power from the lines was off. But it wasn't too much later when the power came back on.

Auntie Violet's setup is such that she switched over to motorhome power without us even noticing it -- there wasn't enough of a glitch to mess up the clock on the microwave oven! And the refrigerator automatically switches over to run on propane instead of electricity.

We had a rain then off and on through the night. The ground was actually wet this morning! Later when we left for Spokane, we could see that there were ropes attached to the pole in the lane (which was sagging), being used as guy wires to hold it upright. Then when we got to the top of the hill and headed east on Rosenoff Road, this is what we saw:

The one pole was completely snapped off. The one behind that you can see in the distance, just had the top part of the pole hanging from the wires -- with no sign of the bottom portion of the pole! There were two more poles like this within the next mile.

This evening when we returned, there were new poles lying on the ground beside the four snapped poles on Rosenoff and another lying beside the leaning pole here in the lane.