Slow News Day....

The streets were cordoned off and the prisoners were desperately attempting to elude capture...

well, not exactly...

Our friend Duwayne was working the little backhoe for the electricians and the folks who had come by to mark on the ground had done their deal... but they did it with a certain 'lack of precision'...
Here you can clearly see the yellow line indicating the gas line, well centered in the grass area next to the sidewalk... if you look at the top, right hand side of the picture, just below the edge of the sidewalk, you can see the gas pipe in question... not exactly even 'close' to the line!

Duwayne managed to nick an inch long tear in the plastic pipe, the first one that he's had in 30 years of this sort of fun, and when he heard the hissss...

The electricians were gone in a flash! and people were called and the cops came and asked folks in the homes nearby to grab their pets and wander away for a little while. Then...
The news anchor, one of our neighbors, came and then
the camera guy showed up and the interviews started and the newspaper guy came over with his giant telephoto camera...

While all this was happening, the guys from the gas company dug up the pipe about 10 feet down the line and clamped it off (pretty simple trick with the new soft pipe stuff) and made a repair...
and everyone had coffee and went back to work... but it was on the Channel 6 news 3 or four times that day and in the paper...

We went to a fundraiser for a local councilwoman that evening (or the next) and in the course of everyone giving me a gentle hard time about shutting down the neighborhood, it turns out that there have at least two other gas leaks within a couple of blocks- within a couple of weeks!

Must have beeen a really slooow News Day...

The newest Pole on the Block

What's wrong with this picture?

... seems that among other things that we can't live without, we need a new power pole... and if we are getting one then it seems that all the neighbors to the end of the block get them too!

It looks so innocent, sleeping quietly on the side walk, currently using no kilowatts at all!

They did the whole thing in a day (shutting down any activity that required 'juice') and started with this Transformer-type vehicle
which unfolded into this giant thing...
They blasted, in about a minute, the receiving hole for the foot of the pole, positioned the bottom, and, in a really elegant series of small moves, brought the 60 foot piece of wood into vertical and dropped it into the hole that was only about 3" wider than the base.

The rest of the day was the wiring...
Here he's taking apart the old pole (the new one is in the background to the right) and transferring everything to the new pole- line by line- and adding three phase power to our section of the block! Everything I'm told by manufacturers and folks is that this will save us money operating our big power things like kilns and heating and air... the folks at the power company tell us power is power, but we are going with it anyway.

There's our new friend! Proud, tall, ready to get to work!

The only part left on this task is to get the cable company to come and take their stuff off the old pole so that it can be taken down... apparently this sometimes takes years...