Open Dialogue

Hot Lines

If you live in Iowa, you know that the whole state has had quite a challenging past couple of weeks when it comes to the weather. We recovered from one snow storm only to get pelted with another.

The most destructive one started off as rain, turned into ice and then snow. Throw in strong winds and we had a bonafide blizzard.

Since I live in an older neighborhood, nature did a lot of pruning. My neighbor and I share a driveway and when we were out shoveling, we marveled over the loss of limbs on the neighborhood trees. This included several lower branches on the very large pine tree in her yard.

"Did you see that power line down in the neighbor's yard?" I looked to the neighbor south of her and saw a line down in the front yard. "What do you suppose that is for?" she continued. I wasn't sure. However, I did know to stay away.

That night I was in bed and having a hard time sleeping. Around 1:00AM, I heard something out front and looked out the window to investigate. There were two Mid-American Energy trucks out front (one blocking my driveway).

I got dressed and made my way outside. There was a man standing in the driveway. "Hi, what are you working on?" I asked. He was startled, I guess not really expecting someone outside at 1:00.

"We're fixing the downed line that was attached to your streetlight here, " he replied. They were working their way down the list of priorities. The line had been down for 2.5 days. I also learned that it was "hot" and that they would have been out sooner had they known this.

posted by Susan @ 10:55 PM