— from Paul Kamin —
OPALCO has planned a County-wide power outage starting right before midnight on May 8th, and extending through 7 AM on May 9th.
EWUA has made plans for this outage.
On advice of OPALCO engineers EWUA will be isolating our facilities from the electric grid in order to safeguard our motors, pumps, and electronic monitoring systems from power anomalies. The vast majority of EWUA member’s water service will not be impacted by the power outage. Most members’ water service is provided via gravity pressure from one of our 7 water storage tanks, which all have capacity to maintain supply throughout this event.
EWUA operates one pressure booster station at our 288 Blanchard facility. This station serves properties whose service is drawn from Terri Lane, Michael Lane, and Timber Lane. EWUA will be operating a generator starting at 11pm on May 8th in order to maintain service for these properties through the night.
EWUA will also be operating our back-up generator to power the Purdue Treatment plant through this event. While not actually necessary, this is a good “practice event” for EWUA’s staff and equipment, and again safeguards EWUA infrastructure.
IF YOU HAVE A PERSONAL PRESSURE BOOSTER STATION/PUMP, the power outage may mean your water service will be impacted. In this case you may wish to check or prepare your “emergency water supply” for use during this power outage.
EWUA will be “reactivating” our wells, treatment systems, and pump stations shortly after OPALCO is able to return power the morning of May 9th.
Please report any water service anomalies you observe after this event.
Here we go again. We live in the most technologically advanced country in the world and for 7 hours Friday night there will be no practical way for my family and potentially eight guests to contact anybody in case of an emergency. And all for the simplest reason. We live in Deer Harbor. Cell phones won’t work, the exercise last year to see if we could use radio failed and the emergency flag on our yard arm for 6 months didn’t even attract an inquiry. We do have one old phone that doesn’t use power and if you can get through the crackles and squeaks, maybe the sheriff will answer – provided his phone is working. Sounds more like 1914 than 2014 to me. The solution to all this irritation is in the “plan” the Council operates with but it seems the 5 year plan in this regard is always 5 years away. Just a small tower masquerading as a tree on Camelback would do wonders.