Power Outage!

So I was working at the library, doing a huge production (shifting all the books so there is room on each shelf for new books so you don't have to cram the returns in) and about an hour and 45 minutes into my shift, the power went out. My immediate thought was "Aww shit...how long is THIS going to last? There's a huge overspill of books on a cart and it's going to take me every minute of this shift to fix it!" So I went to Jill and Helen (my boss and co-worker) and we had to boot everyone out of the library (except for us, lol) and we decided to wait it out.

 

20 minutes go by, and the computers and back up lights were starting to go out, so I put the book drop up for overnight returns. Jill was trying to get a hold of people at other branches and such on the backup phone (the other phones were out), and it turned out pretty much half the city was out of power :|. A half hour later, the power is STILL out, so they had to leave to go to a different library to talk to the other "bosses" (I have no idea what the purpose in that is, but oh well). So I got to head home, an hour and a half early.

 

As I was walking home down my street, I noticed that not everybody had power: Sometimes only half the block would have power and streetlights, sometimes only a few houses on each block would have power. And for a 2 or 3 block stretch getting close to home, there were no streetlights, and only maybe 1 or 2 people with power. Luckily when I got home about 20 minutes ago, we had power. I called 10 minutes after the power first went out, and we didn’t have it for 40 minutes, so I guess it’s coming back slowly, house by house.  

 

I hear that a transformer or something blew up. For half the city to be out of power, and for the power at the library to be out for at least an hour after it first went out, it had to be big. This is such a strange occurrence, so I thought I'd blog about it, lol.

 

 

So yay for getting off of work early! Boo for having to go back on Thursday for 2 hours to finish my "production" of shifting the whole fiction section.

 

 

-Kristal