SRE storm outage update

I have a generator, but there are maybe 20 others in my neighborhood who do not. Among them are elderly people and at least one who has an electric powered oxygen machine.

It would take less than 15 minutes to fix the problem here. A tree fell on a primary that does NOTHING but feed a well. One would think that primary would have had a fuse. All of the lines and poles are good. Instead of cutting that primary loose and resetting the breaker and getting power back up, they say it will be Thursday or Friday.

It is poor planning to set poles and cut trees and do time consuming rebuild jobs while letting a system sit that one man in a bucket truck could fix in fifteen minutes. They need to rethink how they allocate resources. From 6:45 Monday to Thursday or Friday is silly when it is a matter of cutting a primary loose and resetting a breaker.

Annette, I have a power takeoff generator that can be driven by any tractor with a standard PTO. I did this because the worse thing about any generator is they generally sit, and the engines won't run. It is over-sized to not stall or sag under starting load of motors and compressors. I have to start it and transfer it manually by changing an interlocked manual switch, but since I have to get a tractor and hook it up the manual interlock is the least of my efforts.

What concerns me more is how SRE plans their system protection, how frequent our outages are, and if they will ever change how they plan things. While I have power and never lose water, heat, and food...my neighbors are not so lucky. In this last deal, they were without power for sixty hours because of a repair that would have taken one man in a truck 15 minutes. If SRE had spent money to fuse a line that ran back only to a single well, only the well would have failed. This outage followed an outage two weeks ago, and you can bet we will have another in a month or two. There are dead trees withing falling range of the lines in several sport, and no fuses on non-critical lines. When a tree hits a wire, the whole system drops. Since there are only maybe 15 houses, they sit without power until bigger areas are fixed. I wonder where else in the SRE system systems are similar.

I don't think SRE has good planning. (This has NOTHING to do with line crews, just with SRE planning and SRE's concern for people who can't throw away all their food and who have well water.)