AEP started the fire

"It's been burnin since the juice's been flowin..."

Let's just preface this by pointing out it appears it didn't matter if I refrigerated those tortilla shells or not...

Oh, and it's gonna be quite long, but hopefully most definately worth it. There is 35 hours of story to tell...

So I'm at work yesterday around 4:00PM, and it starts thunderstorming. Being that I have about a 13 minute walk from work to my apartment, this is not fun. However the storm breaks, I take a quick look at the radar and see a bigger storm coming. Thus I decide to head home as fast as possible during this eye of the storm.

So I get home and Paul is still at class, and Nick is asleep on the couch. I realize it's pretty hot, but just assume that someone turned the AC off. Well I wander into my room and it is eerily quiet. I look and see my computer and everything else is shut off. Again, my naive self assumed that the cat must have stepped on the on switch on my surge protector, so I flip it a couple times, before realizing that the power must have gone out.

Well the wind starts to get quite strong, I'm going to call them gale-force winds because I always hear people on The Weather Channel say that and have always wanted an excuse to say it. So I'm looking out my window and I see the telephone poles (why are they called that when the power company owns them?) start swaying. There're branches and stuff from the wooded area dividing my apartment + Tuttle park being thrown into the parking lot and hitting the side of the building.

Well all of a sudden the arm on top of the telephone pole I'm looking at cracks and the power lines start falling, so of course I shout "HOLY SHIT! THE POWER LINES ARE FALLING!" and dive onto my bed. Well that wakes Nick up before a there's a huge boom against the side of the apartment right where Nick was sleeping. We look out the window and see that a tree basically just split in half:



About a minute or two later the winds die down, and so we head outside to check out what happened to the tree. So we go onto our patio/balcony and look down:



Right there! In that very spot, I've parked EVERY SINGLE NIGHT since I moved in here. Except last night I decided that I would park in the apartment complex instead of on the side. So I'm counting my blessings that I lucked out... except then I look one spot to the left:



HOLY SHIT... Someone's car just got owned! However, upon further inspection, there's not a whole lot of damage. Broken windshield, cracked fender, possibly a bent axle or two since the tree literally turned the car (it was parked straight). But nothing that would run four digits.

Well the girl who owned the car comes out, surprisingly calm and starts taking pictures and talking to her insurace company. Then all of a sudden NewsCenter comes up, and interviews me (since I saw everything) and the girl whos car got messed up. (I'll try to get a video at a later date) gWell that's all fun and good, but it's starting to get boring.

I then think that, "Wow, my car is right here and that storm is still coming, I'm gonna move it." So I move my car onto campus out of harms way. When I get back, Paul is back from class and checking out the damage and being amazed that his car, which was parked 2 spaces away, is unscathed. So this has gotten boring so I begin looking around... and what do I find? A TV and a bar of soap.

Well I had already called 911, informing them of the downed power lines and the tree on the car so finally a firefighter arrives and tapes off the area. So again, it has gotten quite boring, so Paul, Nick and I are standing on our balcony looking at the wreckage eating from the giant bag of tortilla chips that I had bought 2 nights priot.

All of a sudden, we hear the distinctive snap crackle pop followed by a buzzing hum of a metric fuckton of electricity. We look down and what do we see? Nothing but an energized power line laying on top of a tree thanks to the geniuses at AEP! Last I checked, 10,000+ volts of electricity on wood, on a car causes flames, and of course within 5 seconds, there's fire:



Well, being the journalist/photographer that I am deep down inside, the first thing I do is start taking pictures. Paul decides to chastise me for not calling 911. So I stop and call 911 for the second time in the past half hour. I tell them that there's a live power line and it caught a car on fire. They say they'll transfer me to the fire department where I reach a prerecorded message. "Thanks for calling the Columbus Fire Department. If this is an emergency, please hang up and dial 911..."

Thankfully Nick had also called 911, so I hang up since he was speaking to someone competent and start taking pictures again. Here's a few select pictures (note the open door on my apartment upstairs) that were taken from the time the fire started until the firemen got there about 10 minutes later:




Finally after they have arrived and made sure that everyone is out of harms way, they FINALLY get AEP to shut off the power, so they can start spraying that foam stuff that you use on electrical fires.



Well the fire is out, and photograhpers from the Dispatch are here, and finally AEP arrives. Not I'm not going to mix words. My first impression of AEP from seeing their workers might be that they are the ghettoest pieces of shit... either that or they are outsourcing from Jamaica.

So with the fire out, and the area relatively safe from power turning on again, we go take a look at the car... HOLY SHIT... what was ~$500 of damage and just turned into utter destruction thanks to the wonderful electric company.



Somewhere around here, Paul mentions, "Wow, I'm so glad I closed that door to our apartment or else Cisco (his cat) would have asphyxiated by now." Well, after I point out how using asphyxiated makes light of the situation, I burst his bubble by saying he didn't close it. (Remember the open door from the earlier picture?) And, I have proof that the fireman closed it when he went in to clear the area. ... I'm such a bad person.

So we go out to dinner since I couldn't make Jambalaya as planned. We get back just in time for drunk people to show up carrying a boombox playing the Macarena... Yes, that Macarena. Well with no power, I grab my huge MagLite and we all grab chairs and sit on the patio watching the electric company try to put up a new pole:



***being nonsensical ramblings that are neccessary to finish the story, but not neccessairily entertaining***

Well they work through the night and we all go to sleep without power in the quite hot apartment. Around 2AM I wake up to go bring my car back from campus so I don't get a ticket and see that AEP has made good progress, and I estimate that power will be back by the time I wake up.

Well I wake up at Noon because my boss called (who I told that I probably wouldn't be in since I didn't have any power.) and I don't have power. I look outside and see that the only company left is WOW (Wide Open West), and Paul and Nick tell me that AEP is done, and SBC and Time Warner have already come and gone. So I'm wondering why we still don't have power when there's sounds on the roof. Apparently the feed going to our portion of the apartment complex got yanked out when the pole crashed, so they had to run a new feed.

So hours go by, and still nothing, and by now all the contractors have left. All AEP has to do is come out and connect the power lines on the street to the new power line on the apartment, and we're golden... but they aren't coming.

Its now been more than 24 hours without power, and we're starting to get a little annoyed. So I sleep on and off, and decide to finsih cleaning my room and unpacking anything that I'm ever going to unpack and file my reimbursement paper to BBS (I'm gettin $70 back from Boys State for gas and food, hoorah!). It's now about 5PM, and we're hungry and we have to eat out again... its now been 27 hours without power.

Right about here I realized that all my food has gone bad, and I am not happy. I had 11 servings of lettuce!!! 4lbs of cheese!!! like 30 tortilla shells!!! 1lb of hot sausage!!! and my lovely portobello mushrooms... all ruined. Not to mention everything in the freezer... the Texas Toast, the Buffalo Chicken Strips. That's when I realized this is truely a tragedy.

We get back from dinner hoping they would have connected the power, but no such luck. Paul and Nick can't stand it anymore and head to Buckeye TV to use the intraweb and/or watch telelvision. I decide to stay and sleep and read my poker books. About 9PM they get back, (did I mention its now been 30 hours without power) and I decide to take matters into my own hands, and call AEP.

I get on the phone with some hick woman so I toss in a Southern Drawl on my accent for good measure. She says that they'll send someone out immediately. By this time, we are quite bored, so I decide we should do a Crossword Puzzle... Ya Screw you Plain Dealer, your crossword puzzles aren't fun, they're just torture. So looking for something easier, we move to the Jumble, and Nick gets the final answer without looking at the paper.

Finally AEP arrives, and after we wait some more for the guy with the wire to arrive to come, we FINALLY have power again, after not having power for 35 hours!!!! And I'm sure there's some Katrina joke to be made here, but that's in poor taste, so I'll just leave an [insert joke here].

***end nonsensical ramblings that are neccessary to finish the story, but not neccessairily entertaining***

To see my entire collection of pictures taken, go to http://www.andysite.net/fire/

If you don't feel like going through the entirety of them, at least check some of these out:
The broken arm of the pole
Paul's car in relation to the damage
The girl taking pictures of the damage
One of the power changer things that fell and Nick looking at the damage
It got damn smoky...
Cool Pic of a fireman walking down the stairs with the fire behind him
The smoke was quite black too...
The tire kinda exploded and turned to ash...
One of the first AEP guys on the scene... I think he's saying Holy Shit, we fucked up....
The force of the foam water broke the first floor apartment's window...
Final overhead shot post-fire

Oh, and being that we lost like $300 of food, plus had to buy like 4 meals, you should feel bad for us. And my blog is entertaining, so there may or may not be a PayPal link right here....

Lastly, I truely think this picture with the car's owner sums it up quite nicely:



"They ignited it, and we can't fight it..."