Power's Up! About 6:30PM last evening the lights came on! What a great moment. In the early afternoon, I had noticed a large lineman crew from Sumter Utilities working in our neighborhood, and I had spoken with them in the hope that they would soon get to our little piece of the grid.

They were from near Sumter, SC, but the man I spoke to said his group lived toward the NC/SC line. He also told me that they had first come down for Katrina, and had been pre-positioned here when it roared through. Then they went home for a couple of days, then to Biloxi, then home for a couple of days, then to some town in Louisiana, then home, and then here. I asked him where they are staying here, and he said the Fountainbleu Hotel! (Nothing else was avaliable.)

About mid-afternoon I learned from a neighbor that there was a lineman crew working over on Hammond Drive, between Ibis and Heron, which is just NE of us. It is down Hammond that our piece of the grid travels before it turns west down our alley. So I got on my bike and spent the next couple of hours off and on watching the crew do its work, mainly dealing with and replacing two poles that the storm had snapped. It was the Sumter crew.

Some interesting things about the crew that I noticed: They were all white, not a black man among them. No latins either, They spoke with a right heavy rural drawl, and several of them smoked. They were clean-cut and, despite working all day, clean. They worked steadily. They were deliberate, very careful, but they never seemed to take breaks, and they seemed thoroughly competent. They were appropriately intense and there was no joking around - totally professional. They had a tool for everything, and looked in terrific shape. I would not call them "good ol' boys", because that term suggests (to me at least) a sort of propensity to incompetence that personality and relationships cover over. These were the sort of men that James Webb wrote about.

When the downed pole on Hammand had been replaced,the sun was fast going down, I became concerned that they would not get to my alley. I had earlier noticed that the fuse on the transformer on a pole half-way down the alley to our house had blown, and I knew that they would need to replace the fuse after the power was up. One of my neighbors said they were getting ready to go. I looked for the man I had spoken to earlier that day, and he happened to drive up in one of the supervisor trucks. I asked him whether he could send someone over to look at that fuse. He said, "I've sent someone over already. I remember we talked today. I didn't forget you."

And so I rode my bike over to our block and, sure enough, there was a crew with a lift-bucket truck getting in position to fix the fuse. By then it was nearly dark. I saw the lineman lift up on a special stick and put in place the new fuse. Below the fixture, now in place, dangled a sort of latch which, when closed, makes the circuit. He brought the stick down, caught 'hold of the bottom end of latch, and lifted it up into place. Where the latch made contact, there was a bright spark, and then the lights in the neighborhood came on!

Note: Sumter Utilities is an example of the de-verticalization of the electric utility world. It has no grid of its own to tend. It works for others who do.