Missing the small town…
I grew up in a small town. Like, no traffic lights small. 26 miles from the nearest hospital/movie theater/mcdonald’s, and 55 miles from the nearest “civilization” (Target, mall, Costco, tv stations)
Our “local” newspaper always had the police blotter in it-a record of all the calls made in the area in the last day. Monday’s was always fun because it included all the high schoolers that got MIPs or cited for other hijinks. Not to mention if you heard sirens headed someplace, you didn’t have to wonder what was going on, it would be in the paper tomorrow.
Friday afternoon as I sat on my deck, I heard sirens. Then I heard/felt some sounds that sort of sounded like gunshots but could have been cars crashing, and decided that since it could be gunshots it wasn’t something I needed to sashay up the street and investigate.
My mistake.
When Mister Fishbones came home around 6:30 he said the entire block was totally taped off and they weren’t letting anyone by, and there were a bunch of utility looking trucks there, but he couldn’t get close enough to tell what utility they were. Then when I went off dogsitting about 9:30 I took the long way and saw that the block was still surrounded by crime tape and there were still utility trucks EVERYWHERE. I came home and told Mister Fishbones if they were still there doing utility work I wonder what happened but it had to be serious…
..and then the lights went out.
We walked up the street to see what we could see, and they were installing a brand new utility pole. What was there before was history - snapped in half. It was interesting to see a new pole go in, I had idea how they worked that sort of thing, not to mention how deep those suckers are in the ground! We wondered about what could have been big enough and going fast enough to hit a utility pole and break it in half.
I have been prowling the local news sites since early Saturday morning and never found anything about what happened.
I sure do miss the police blotter.
Related posts:
Was it possibly this: http://community.livejournal.com/damnportlanders/7427228.html?nc=7
It sounds similar, and it happened on Friday afternoon.
Rebecca, that was PRECISELY it! Thank you SO much for pointing me to Livejournal, which is apparently the most reliable source for local news.
My power was out for about four hours while they replaced that pole. Holy cow!