I live in a wonderful little seaside community just a few miles south of San Francisco. Most of the year it’s absolutely heaven, but recently winters have been a little trying. Last winter in particular, the powerful storms coming in off the ocean toppled numerous trees and branches in my town and we lost power on two occasions totaling over nine days of outages. This winter we’ve already had a 4+ day outage just last week for the same reason. The last few days have been very calm and everything seemed to be back in order, until I heard my printer and router recycling oddly in the early morning and looked outside to see the image above; my power pole actually on fire. Since our power was still flickering on and off, I immediately shut off the main breakers, and now we wait again for normalcy.
Our utility is PG&E and they are infamous in these parts. I’ve just signed a petition to dissolve them in favor of a community owned utility. They seem to be grossly inefficient and our rates are said to be twice the national average. It seems likely the best solution is to bury all the lines.
Just thought I’d share my little adventure this morning.