The lights are off and everyone is home
Monday, September 28, 2009 at 11:00AM If you live in the lower Queen Anne area, you’ll know what I’m talking about.
This weekend, LQA folks experienced two power outages that lasted between 1.5 – 3 hours long, depending on where you were located.
Seattle City Light (@SEACityLight) had a helpful tweet on Friday that stated:
“Planned outage for maintenance Sat. AM near Seattle Center. Affected customers were notified directly. More at http://powerlines.seattle.gov”
So there was a planned outage for Saturday morning that should have lasted from 12 am – 8 am. Cool, those are hours when most people are either not home, at home asleep, or crawling back home inebriated from that evening’s festivities. I’m not entirely sure what happened (if the scheduled event took place) but an outage took place from about 9 am – 12 pm. Yeah, not such good timing.
Not sure what you were doing around that time but I had just gotten home from the gym and was ready to start my weekend by hopping into the shower… when the power went out. Fortunately, I could wait it out (the beauty of a lazy Saturday is that you can be lazy) but I know folks in my apartment building were doing laundry, cooking and, if you were my roommate, getting ready for a wedding.
When the power first went out, I immediately jumped online (via my handy dandy iPhone) and looked up Seattle City Light contact info. I dialed the “Report an Outage” hotline… and got a busy signal. I stared at my phone for a minute, in disbelief (“What is this, 1998? A busy signal? In this day and age??”) before I jumped on Twitter.
I did a quick search for “Outage” and “Queen Anne” and found a plethora of folks who were going through the same thing I was:
It didn’t make me feel better (because… yeah, I just wanted power back) but it did comfort me a little. Now I knew that it wasn’t just my building affected, it was lower Queen Anne. But most importantly- I wasn’t alone!
I then tweeted King 5 (@King5Seattle) to ask them if they had heard anything. The response was prompt:
I continued tracking all of this on Twitter until the power in my building came back on. I even sent a couple of tweets to @SEACityLight but got no response. It later turned out that something had happened to a feeder… or something. I don’t really know the specifics but it resulted in thousands of people going without power for a couple of hours.
Sunday night rolls around and the same thing happens. Lights flicker and then go out. I immediately jump on Twitter to see what’s going on and if I can find any helpful information. Once again, I get more info from people around me and from @KING5Seattle than I do from @SEACityLight or their website.
So what’s the lesson here, kids? Well, Twitter is effing useful in situations where you don’t have access to TV and online sites are updated too slow. I got all my information about the outage, its parameters and cause through people on Twitter than I did from anywhere else.
I’m sending out good karma vibes to @KING5Seattle- whoever manages that handle is fantastic! They were on the outage like white on rice as well as other local news- I do hope that person got some sleep last night.
So even if Twitter is just a fad, it certainly helped me get through a power AND news blackout. I don’t think it helped get the power back on by any means (although it may have helped the news desks at several local stations hear about the situation first) but it did help one person not feel so freaked out and alone.
I even made a new friend (Here’s looking at you @GourleyGirl) and some people could find the humor in the event:
I knew the Decepticons were up to no good!
For info on what to do when a power outage happens, check out the Seattle City site: http://www.cityofseattle.net/light/neighborhoods/nh4_pout.htm
If you want to report a power outage, dial these numbers:
Seattle City Lights Customer Service at 206.684.3000.
Outage Hotline (recorded message) at 206.684.7400.
Edited to note: Check out @QueenAnneView on Twitter for news around, you guessed it- Queen Anne. They were also tweeting about the outage this weekend and posted quick updates on their blog: http://www.queenanneview.com/
…or check Twitter. That’s what I did…
Porter Novelli, Social Media, Twitter, outage, queen anne, seattle in Social Media, WTF
Reader Comments (10)
Very impressed with how @KING5Seattle was on top of the situation and trying to help find a solution to the problem! Glad to hear you made it through the outage ok. :)
Interesting that this happened the same time that City Light - along with 7 other city departments - were launching CityLink, an effort to consolidate information sharing at http://www.seattle.gov/citylink/. Seems like they should skip the hassle, expense and delay of a web site in favor of a quicker system of information distribution (or at least augment the website in this way). You'll note that CityLink includes the original notice of the shut off but no update on the problems you experienced.
I heard about that outage from you via Facebook! What a mess...Seriously...what did we do before iPhones? Very good post!
i agree, great post! a truly timely case study on the power and helpfulness of twitter.
Maybe @SEACityLIght really WERE watching Twitter, not responding, and doing a case study about how much people hate them?
Similar thing happened to me too. I came home from a run on Saturday morning to find the power was out. Normally it wouldn't have been a big deal but I was going to meet my sister for lunch, so I searched the apartment for candles (seemingly difficult to find in a bachelor's apartment), found two and took a shower by candle light. Power was back on by the time I got home at 5:00.
Sunday night was a different situation, my roommate and I were on our way home from dinner to go home and watch Entourage. I was more than a little upset to find the power was out, again. That meant 1) No Entourage 2) No DVR to record Entourage. On a side note, driving on Queen Anne with all the lights out was a weird experience. I actually had to use my iPhone as a flash light to see wear I was walking on the sidewalk.
It was really crazy! We were on it too, communicating back and forth with KING and a bunch of readers for updates from all over the hill.
http://www.queenanneview.com/2009/09/27/power-is-out-on-queen-anne-again/
looking forward to the day when Twitter handles are standard information to include in contact info for utilities and businesses along with email, URL and phone number.
UPDATE: The DVR was able to catch Entourage just before the power had gone out on Sunday. Family Guy was an entirely different story, however.
Wow! I go out of town for one week and miss all the excitement! Good thing the power didn't go out while I was packing....