12/18/2016: Day 5: We’re now among the lucky 90% of Eugene residents with electricity. It’s nice. Thank you IBEW. And the suspicious red oak is roped to two others that lean away from the kitchen. Thank you Cummings Tree Service.
12/17/2016: Going into day 4, I’m thinking a bit of Islay cut with ice covered branches ripped from the red oak that’s about to fall and crush the house:
The perfect bookend to a great dinner of quail, polenta, and pie, thanks to some warm friends.
Outstanding choice! Ardbeg Uigeadail is worth the extra price over the 10-yr.
Use of ice is problematic.
I believe the UO faculty should allow for some diversity of thought on a matter as important as ice, at least until my experimental trials are complete and have undergone peer review.
Uh, UOM, what about controls, double blind, all that …? I think your research protocol could get you onto thin ice if you’re not careful. NSF, NIH, HHS all will be monitoring you closely.
At least you probably don’t have to worry about EPA yet.
Ah, we all seem to enjoy these things in our own way. Bill with his refined taste. I by hiking in the glistening woods. Colleagues by actually going into UO to work on research!
Yeah electricity is rad. The Coleman stove works fine but after 4 days of outdoor cooking I was ready to join civilization again.
Yay EWEB!
I fail to understand why EWEB persists with a 19th Cent technology and fails to put power lines underground? I know it would not be inexpensive but surely a tax district might be set up to manage the costs with a long term loan. Clearly the current program of tree pruning does not work. We have experienced two major and two minor outages over the last 30 months. And living near Bill may be part of the problem.
But if we bury our power lines, only the guvmint will know where they are. You plutons might trust politicians with that info, but us americans know better. Instead the rich will get tax credits for solar roofs, the middle class will get cheap chinese generators (4KW for $299! at http://www.harborfreight.com/engines-generators/gas-engine-generators/4000-peak3200-running-watts-65-hp-212cc-generator-carb-69728.html) and the poor will die trying to heat their trailers with kerosene.
I don’t want the Chinese knowing where we’ve buried our shit.
Long story short
1) Tokyo is one of the only cities in the world with extensive underground power lines – this is because
the city was rebuilt after WW2
2) While underground power lines are a solution to rare ice storms a) they are much more expensive than “not inexpensive”
b) underground power lines are very much subject to flooding (a possibly worse problem than ice storms) and they are just as subject to lightning disruption as overhead power lines.
This issue comes up re-actively everytime and event occurs. See for example
http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/12/us/winter-storm-power-lines/
finally the logistics of the install would be quite disruptive to most all neighborhoods and there would be wide spread brown outs while individual neighborhoods are switched to the new infrastructure.
so unlikely to happen – the real lesson here is homeowner resiliency now that you know this is possible to happen here.
I suppose that one might make the case that the destruction of European cities in WW2 made underground wires possible, but my experience in Europe is that cities large and small have their lines underground and that most were underground before the war. I realize that one may not want to lay electric and telephone lines parallel to natural gas lines, but the fact is that Eugene and NYC and many others do have canalization and gas underground. Hence, having such utilities underground has plenty of precedents even in our home town. And if I am not mistaken, even our beloved UO has made the same move in many places.
the UO steam tunnels were built into the university for
the delivery of heat and that infrastructure was then
later used for network and power on campus – there was not retrofit from above ground to below ground. When new buildings are built on campus – there is a need to
extend some of the steam tunnels.