Two helium-filled party balloons floated up from a commencement ceremony somewhere in West Virginia to cause a power outage in the Ohio Appalachians. The butterfly effect of this event reminded me that no matter how reliable utilities have become,
there are no guarantees of uninterrupted service.
After talking with the rural electric linemen who responded to the outage, I learned that the balloons -- imprinted with the cheery message “Congrats, Grad!” – were found, deflated and limply fluttering, on a transformer pole where the line had shorted.
I have heard of power outages caused by raccoons, birds, and snakes in substations; squirrels, large grasshoppers, wasps, or lizards that allow current to go to ground across their bodies; hawks and owls that carry rabbits to the tops of poles to dine, but get careless; even by fish (an osprey that dropped a large pike across two phases of a narrow-frame, lakeside circuit). To this list, I can now add party balloons.
Whatever the causes – storm winds or lightning, ice build-up in winter, failed equipment, falling trees or blowing limbs, tornadoes, hurricanes, wild critters or party balloons -- electric consumers today have no tolerance for and little patience with power outages. We have surrounded ourselves with a myriad of electrical devices, all of which plug into power outlets and, we believe, are indispensable to our lives.
Years ago, living in rural Appalachia meant people relied on kerosene lamps for nighttime illumination. They cooked their beans and cornbread on a wood stove, and went to bed about the time chickens flew up to roost.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt changed all this when he signed the Rural Electrification Act into law in 1935. Across the nation, rural electric cooperatives were organized by farm families and rural residents who wanted “The Electric” and saw no reason they shouldn’t benefit from central station power, like their big city neighbors had for decades. They were tired of waiting for private power companies to extend lines.
REA meant they could take matters in their own hands, and they did. Using REA loans, they built their electric co-ops from the ground up.
By the mid-to-late1950’s, most of rural America had been electrified, and a great improvement in quality of life was noted. Rural folks not only had electric lights, spring and well pumps, stoves, refrigerators, washing machines, and water heaters, they also enjoyed their television sets, radios, record players, sewing machines, hair curlers, irons, toasters, coffee percolators, vacuum cleaners, and room fans.
Power was cheap and plentiful in those days, and rural electric cooperatives promoted demand. Outdoor security lights became popular, and rural folks were encouraged to build all-electric homes with central heating and air conditioning.
Every decade brought more reliance on electricity. Computers, scanners, printers, faxes, digital TVs, home entertainment centers, satellite radios, security systems, electric fences, even electric patio grills and lawnmowers, burst onto the scene during the last quarter of the 20th Century. And, as use of kilowatts increased, so did impatience with service interruptions.
Not so when the first rural electric lines were erected.
My maternal grandfather at first resisted rural electrification and actually cut down the REA poles on his property, but he relented when domestic pressure was brought to bear by my grandmother, a woman who had borne 14 children and washed all their clothes in a kettle with a rub board.
After Granny forced Grandpa Mack to allow workers to string a copper line across their farm in 1955, the next thing that happened was the arrival of a panel truck loaded with jack-leg electricians who wired the old two-story house. They were followed by a delivery truck crammed with appliances, including – to Granny’s everlasting delight – a wringer washing machine.
As a child, I spent summers with my grandparents at the farmhouse on a ridge above the Tennessee River. In August, with the temperature spiking above 95 degrees and the cotton fields baking under a white-hot blob of sun, we often prayed for a thunderstorm to cool things off. Sometimes, the Good Lord answered with rumbles of thunder, and He sent rain squalls sweeping down the river. Forks of lightning stabbed the ground, and the lonely co-op utility poles drew many strikes.
Electricity being a comparatively new thing to my grandparents, they never complained when a storm knocked out the power. We’d sit on the porch and wait. Often, when we went to sleep, the single-phase line serving Mussel Camp Hollow had still not been re-energized.
Granny herded everyone off to bed with the admonition: “If ‘The Electric’ is still off in the morning, somebody’s got to bring me firewood for the stove if y’all want breakfast!” She had wisely kept the dinosaur of a wood stove, having moved it to the summer kitchen where the canning and pickling occurred.
No one was upset by an extended power outage. They took it in stride, even if it meant rising earlier than normal to chop an armful of kindling for the old wood burner. How different things are today, when the majority of Americans can’t remember what it was like to be a non-electrified consumer.
Without electricity, our computers won’t operate; we can’t go on-line and surf the Web; the microwave oven is of no use for zapping slices of pizza; the home entertainment center, with its DVD player, big screen TV, and speakers, is mute and dead. All these modern contrivances are just so much plastic junk without electrons.
When the lights go out at my home, I try to recall Granny, shooing us grandchildren off the porch at bedtime after we’d been waiting for hours to see if the lights would come back on.
“You young’uns don’t worry ‘bout it,” she said. “If ‘The Electric’ ain’t on in the morning, it will be later in the day. Them REA boys won’t forget us.”
And, they never did.
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