A power line that runs over my back yard shorted out today, causing some weeds to catch on fire. I had rolled the hose up and put it in the garage just this morning, so when I realized there was a fire, I ran inside the house to get my keys, ran back outside to unlock the garage door, then grabbed the hose and hooked it up to the spigot, and ran behind the garage and started putting out the fire. And I did it all barefoot, so I’ve got some small cuts on the bottoms of my feet. I ended up calling the fire department afterwards because initially I wasn’t sure what caused the fire, and the guy that came out to look at it was kind of a dipshit. He didn’t think the power line caused it, even though the power went out in part of my house at the exact time I realized my back yard was on fire.
After he left, I tested the power coming into the house at the fusebox, and found that only one circuit had power coming in. I tried calling several phone numbers at Price City, but of course, nobody was there, and they don’t have an after-hours number. I ended up having to call the police dispatcher in order to get a Price City utility worker out to my house to fix the problem. A guy finally showed up and tested the power right at the meter, and found the same thing that I told him I had already figured out. So he called somebody from Utah Power, and after about 45 minutes of waiting, another guy showed up. He quickly found exactly where the power line had shorted out–a tree limb had rubbed the shielding off the wire–but since the tree was growing too close to the utility pole, he couldn’t climb it with his climbing spikes. He had to go back to work and get his Ford 1-ton dually cherry picker, which barely fit through the gap in my back fence from my mom’s driveway. He trimmed the tree, shut off power to the whole neighborhood, spliced some new wire into the line, then had to make a 10-point turn to get back out of my yard.
I almost wish I hadn’t been home when it happened, because I wouldn’t mind too much if everything burned down. The fire came to within a foot of the wood pile at the back of the garage, and if that had caught fire, not even the fire department would have been able to put it out in time.
Believe me, fires suck.