The View From My Front Porch

First I heard a pop.  I looked out the window to see a truck across the street that had hopped the curb and was out of control.  Then a crash.  Stepping onto my porch, this is what I saw:

I ran in to call 911 and found my phone wasn’t working.  Trying to figure out what was wrong, I quickly realized that the power was out.  For us, that also means no phone.  I grabbed my cell phone only to find the battery was dead.  I plugged it into the charger only to remember the power was out!  All of this happened in a matter of seconds, but already neighbors were gathering around and I saw others on their phones.  Before long, the emergency vehicles started arriving:

Pretty soon there were also several police cars, an ambulance, and eventually 5 trucks from the Electric Company.  With an officer directing traffic (the street was down to one lane for about 3 hours), the utility workers started removing the severed pole. (Yes, severed.  If you go back to the first picture, the pole has been completely knocked off its base.  The rest is under the vehicle but was still sticking out of the ground far enough that I think that’s why his front wheels aren’t touching the ground.)

With the pole out of the way, they were able to remove the vehicle.

In between the utility workers, you can see the stump that was under the vehicle.  It’s amazing how deep in the ground those posts are.  The part sticking up is only about 1/4 the length of what was underground.  Once they got that out, they drilled out the hole and inserted the new pole.  (By this time, I was in the house trying to find something for dinner so no photos… sorry!)  We were without electricity for 3 1/2 hours and the utility workers worked for another 30 minutes beyond that finishing and cleaning up.

So what happened?  Well, my guess was that a tire blew and caused the vehicle to go out of control.  But in talking to a neighbor, she said that the driver thought he must have dozed off.  So what I thought was a tire blowing was probably the truck hitting the curb in the first place.  The amazing thing is that the driver walked away.

This is the driver with his wife.  She showed up about an hour and a half after this whole ordeal began.  Their embrace when she arrived was very sweet.

Since my kids thought they were going to die of boredom with no electricity, at least we had a good view from the front porch!