It’s been an exciting week here at “Lake Wobegon”. Several days last week the temps during the day were up in the high sixties and low seventies. I took Carolyn on a tour around the building parking area with just a light sweater on. You could even start to dream of summer days coming soon to our area.
Then came a cold front yesterday. It was slow moving, but wide, covering the country between Fort Worth and Tulsa. It was mostly rain, heavy in places, with weather warnings of flooding in low lying areas. Last night the cold side of the front sneaked into Durant. The temps went down to 32º and stayed there all day. A drizzling rain continued, covering the trees and fences with ice.
As the day wore on, trees and branches started to fall from the heavy load of ice. Roads that weren’t blocked by deep water were now blocked by tree branches.
I was scheduled to drive down to Denton, TX, to move another trailer full of furniture and other items from Darlene’s old digs to her new apartment in Durant. When I first checked the weather I considered cancelling, assuming that the road would be a sheet of ice. I decided to carefully drive to the gas station and fill up the tank, and then decide if I wanted to go farther.
Driving turned out to be a non event. The ground is still warm from the balmy days of last week, so there was no ice on the pavement at all. I continued on to Texas with no more trouble than about 8-10” of standing water in Durant city streets around Mulberry and 7th.
After returning with Darlene’s stuff and putting it into her apartment, I went to see Carolyn at Featherstone about 1:00 PM. She was still in bed sleeping soundly, so I went to the CNA on duty and asked how her day had been. They told me she ate breakfast well, and then the hospice nurses came and bathed her and changed her clothes. They put her to bed and she went to sleep and stayed that way through lunch. She looked so comfortable they didn’t want to wake her!
I opened the shades, turned on the overhead light, and in a few minutes she began to awaken. I got her up, walked her to the bathroom, changed her underwear and pants, and then walked her back into the room and put her in the wheelchair. Her pelvis seems to be healing fine, and she can walk with no pain. However, she is still pretty wobbly on her feet, probably from too many days of being restricted to the bed or the wheelchair.
I am getting good at walking backward and holding her hands up for balance and ready to catch her if she stumbles. One of the residents commented that it looked like we were waltzing down the hall. If she keeps improving, we’ll be doing the tango.
At 5:00 PM I walked her to a chair in the dining room for dinner, and she was eating well, when all of a sudden the lights went out. The emergency lighting in the hallways came on dimly. After about twenty seconds the lights briefly flashed and went off again to stay. I knew this might be a long one, since the flicker is a reclosing breaker trying get electricity back online and finding a dead short to ground. That would be a tree branch falling onto the wires.
Tonight will be the night the linemen earn their pay. I worked for the power company for over thirty years, and I never begrudged a lineman his higher pay. I was a machinist, and when the power went out, at least I got to work inside most of the time.
The staff had obviously been trained in what to do when the power goes off. All the door locks fail in unlocked mode, so nobody gets trapped inside. Immediately chairs were placed in front of each door to prevent residents from wandering out into the frigid outdoors. People were assigned to guard the doors, also, and I volunteered to take one of the ones in back.
I was sitting in the chair fiddling with my cellphone, and bemoaning the fact that there is no Wifi in this corner. After a while I realized with no power anywhere, there was no Wifi anywhere else, either.
At 6:30 PM the power came on with a bang. All the doors are held locked with electromagnets, and as the doors had relaxed, they were slammed pretty hard by the return of electricity. A cheer went up from the dining room, where most of the residents had stayed during the outage.
I was impressed with the emergency response to what could have been a much worse case. The manager called the hospice organizations to coordinate an evacuation if the outage had lasted all night, since the heaters were incapacitated. I’m not sure where the evacuation destination was, but I assume the hospices would have a handle on spare rooms in other nursing homes, hospitals, etc.
It wouldn’t be a bad idea to see about an upgrade to the physical building systems, either. An emergency generator on site, or even access to one on a trailer which could be brought in and hooked up to the building would be nice.
An easy upgrade would be to refit the dining room with LED lighting with TESLA battery storage on the wall. I’m pretty sure such a system would give all night lighting to at least part of the building. And that would be bright lighting, not the dim bulbs we have on the hall walls now.
I overheard one of the staff talking about getting tee shirts printed out with the message, “I SURVIVED THE FEATHERSTONE BLACKOUT!”
I’ll buy a couple!
No comments:
Post a Comment