widespread power outage oct 27th 2015
Yay! The day before the remnants of Hurricane Patricia (from down Puerto Vallarta Mexico way) were scheduled to run over us, the city of Kingston Ontario and the surrounding area, was hit by a widespread power outage, caused by a failure at one of the major transformer stations.
Our part of the city was down from 09:24 to 09:54, just as the cogeneration plant on campus was about to fire up, but it seems it never did. Outside of the city, at home, the power was just fine.. until just after 13:20… where it seems power was diverted into the city.. leaving us high and dry until around 21:00.
The freezers and fridges survived without issue, as did we, as we have cats.
A good supply of battery powered lighting actually worked, although one unit does need new batteries. Food was prepared on the barbeque and that worked well. We had some bottled water (large containers) acting as a thermal mass in the cold room (to help prevent large temperature fluctuations) and ended up using that for various purposes through the evening.
After the first few Estimated Time of Repairs went by, we fired up some alternative power to run the wood pellet stove and a little more lighting. More ETRs went by and we called it a day, turning off anything that might come on again later when power would eventually be restored.
All in all a good training experience.. We now have a list of items to act on to make the next one (possibly even today!) better and smoother and safer.
In the meantime, allsky1 is *down*, radiojove is *down*, sid2 is *down* and in all likelihood will remain so until the weather clears late Thursday.