A cold front moving down from Alaska has brought the coldest weather to Ferndale since we’ve moved here. This morning I was watching TV and had just gotten through the weather report where they were talking about the storm when the power went off. Then immediately back on. The the lights in the room went really bright. Then they went off. Then they came back on, only half dimmed. Then they flickered on and off for awhile before finally coming back on half way. I got up to go turn off the circuit breaker when I noticed the smell of electrical equipment burning in the kitchen. After tripping the main, I went back inside and climbed into the attic just to make sure there wasn’t any fire up there.

Finding everything ok up there, I called some neighbors and found that their power was ok. So then I figured it must be something to do with our power drop. I called PGE to let them know we had a problem, and then went outside to investigate. What I found surprised me. The support cable that is wrapped with the power lines had snapped in two.

When the PGE guy arrived and inspected it closer than I was willing to, he said it looked like the wires had lost some insulation and when the ice formed it created a path for the lines to arc and that burned a hole in the support cable. I was surprised that it didn’t burn the actual wires too, or trip the breaker on the pole.

While I was waiting for the PGE guy to arrive, I drove into town to get my camera. This was about 8:00 and even though the sun had been up for about an hour then, it was only 25 degrees. I took pictures outside for as long as I could stand it and I’ll feature a few of those later this week. It’s supposed to get even colder tomorrow. Can’t wait.