Throughout my entire life, I have had the strange proclivity of being in the wrong place at the right time. For much of my life, this brought me a certain sense of frustration and even misery, but eventually I realized that this sort of happenstance was not in any way personally chosen by me but was rather an opportunity to gain insight that would otherwise not be present because it allowed for concentrated opportunities at pattern recognition that allowed me to see things ahead of time and to thus be better prepared for the inevitable crises and difficulties that I and the world around me (and the communities I am a part of) have found themselves in. To be sure, it is more pleasant to be in the right place at the right time, but being in the wrong place at the right time does have at least some compensating benefits.

This morning I found myself in such a situation, working at my computer in a small duplex in the small town of Eatonville, Washington, when the power went out suddenly and without warning. At the time the power went out there was a truck working somewhere near us, and so we thought that the truck had simply knocked out power in our area. We found out, upon investigation, though, that the power was out in the entire city, and a bit of sleuthing determined that the whole town of Eatonville had the power knocked out with a “scheduled” outage starting at noon (it was a bit before 10AM when the outage started) due to the wind knocking down a transmission line that came from Tacoma. Given the lack of warning and the clearly unscheduled nature of the outing, it was unclear what had happened, though, and in the absence of a believable story given the mismatch between what was said (a scheduled outage starting at noon and lasting for perhaps twelve hours) with the fact that the outage was clearly unscheduled and would last for who knows how long, it was not hard for conspiracy and thoughts of sabotage to be entertained.

Given that I had much to do, it was clearly not acceptable to remain in a place where I would be unable to do anything, not cook nor use the computer, I changed and got ready and then went out first to get lunch–which was not as easy in the middle of the day as one would assume. At any rate, once I found a place to eat lunch in Elbe (short review: I had the fish and chips as well as ice water and iced tea. The fries weren’t great and were pretty greasy but the cod fish sticks were tasty, if not as large as one would like. The serving sizes were consistently small but the service was reasonably attentive even if they didn’t have pizza cheese.) before going over the yurt to work. Despite waiting a bit to make sure that working in the yurt wouldn’t be a problem, I was able to get set up before too long and end up having a somewhat productive afternoon as I write this, with hopes for a still more productive evening hopefully with a large and satisfying dinner at some point.

In my driving out of Eatonville, though, I did find something that helped curb the tendency towards conspiracy theories, at least in part. Along the Alden cutoff out of town, there was an incredibly long line of vehicles from Tacoma Power and from Pierce county in general, including large transportation vehicles that were repaving the windy road into town. It seems likely, given the large number of vehicles involved and the remnant signs of there being one lane at a time paving, that it was some sort of incompetence rather than direct sabotage when it came to knocking out power for thousands of people. Let us hope that the power comes back soon, and that such outages are not a sign of greater and more common problems, but such times as we live in appear too dark to hope that one can entirely escape the threat of sabotage and domestic terrorism.

Afterword: Not too long after I finished this particular post I spoke with a gentleman whose family owns the yurt and the surrounding area where I was working during the power outage and he informed me that the power outage definitely came from a substation, as opposed to the claims that wind had damaged a transmission line. As far as what exactly happened at the substation, whether it was mechanical error or sabotage or something else, it is unclear at this time. Nonetheless, it is always worthwhile to add information when more is known about a situation.