One bottleneck in power line restoration is the lack of tree surgeons to remove the "widow makers" that overhang the downed power lines. Line crews like to see the tree removed before they tackle the repair of the power line.
On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 10:44 AM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com>wrote: > The Georgia Power outage map is interesting. It shows the number of > customers affected increased from 77,132 at 9:45 to 97,450 at 10:15. There > are now 940 outages. Individual outages are not being cleared very quickly. > One at Timberland drive has been listed since this morning. It is affecting > more people than before, now at 842 customers. > > I guess this illustrates the limits of parallel efforts to maintain a > network. I mean that it takes a work crew a certain amount of time to cut > branches and repair fallen power lines. It takes as long as it does, and > having hundreds of other work crews standing by does not make it go any > faster. > > I expect they still have spare work crews standing by, because the news > showed hundreds of trucks coming in from out of state yesterday, and > because 940 outages affecting 97,000 customers is not a lot for an area as > large as this, with a population as high as this. > > At 10:25 the number of outages has risen to 995 affecting 97,683. I don't > see any of the local ones cleared. That is not suggest the power company > crews are not working hard. > > Oops! My power just dropped for a second. Back on. This is eerie, watching > the network fail in real time. > > So far this storm is not a big deal. I have seen much worse ice storms in > Atlanta. > > - Jed > >
