They Are Linemen for the County….

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Back in 2008, when Hurricane Ike’s remnants came through, I was without electricity for a week. Less than six months later, we had an ice storm. Between the two, it was estimated that 90-95% of Louisville lost power at one time. Apparently our electric company learned from those two back-to-back experiences. I’m home. With electricity. Less than 48 hours after a windstorm for the history books came through. Gee, that wasn’t much of a trip, was it? Here’s the trip in a nutshell: I went to Carrollton, Kentucky for a cheap hotel, then drove up to Florence, KY (home of the “Florence Y’all” water tower) for lunch. While there I decided that, since there was no estimated time of restoration on the website, I’d go meander around the Smoky Mountains for a couple of days. I got as far as Dry Ridge, Kentucky when my next-door neighbor called with the good news: we had power. The sign in the picture is what Dry Ridge is most well-known for. Mary Frances Penick, better known as Skeeter Davis, was born there. For you kids, she had a massive country and pop hit in 1962 with the song “The End of the World.” That’s about all I did on this “trip.” I came straight home after the call and reset everything…which, granted, wasn’t much: just the garage door opener, the light timer in the living room, and the clock in the microwave. Since Daylight Savings Time starts next week (and, as I always tell you, this time next week it won’t be this time next week [except in Arizona and Hawaii, where they’re smart enough to leave the clocks alone]) I’ll have a lot of clocks to change in the coming days. The wall clocks I have, however, are battery operated, so they didn’t lose any time. God bless the linemen and women out there working to restore the power. Consider that they really couldn’t do anything Friday until the winds died down, and they didn’t die down until after midnight. PLUS, we couldn’t rely on a lot of out-of-town help (the way you see all of those bucket trucks in Florida after a hurricane) because this was a hard-hitting and far-reaching storm. There was damage in Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama (with at least six deaths there). The Wichita and Kentucky linemen are still on the line, because there are still over 40,000 in Louisville without power. That’s half of what it was 36 hours ago. The statewide number has gone from nearly 190,000 to 88,000. In less than two days. They’re doing an amazing job. They learned a lot from those back-to-back disasters in 2008 and early 2009. I’m really sorry they had to put the education to use again, but I’m glad to see power being restored in hours and days, not weeks. And I’m sorry we didn’t get a better road trip out of it.