WPD: Power won’t be back until 3am
By JOHN ANDERSON
Since I can’t respond to all the texts and emails, I drove around and talked to workers. Something I used to do as a real reporter when we had media here.
First off: It’s not a town of Wellsville or village of Wellsville issue. Not our stuff. It’s a National Grid line.
We will not have power until 3 am. I’m smart enough to know I better say that right off the bat!
And to sumup what confused me for 10 minutes, there’s a small line near Niles Hill that for some reason, when a tree hits it or a fire stars on it, it knocks Wellsville out of power.
Everywhere else, there are lines coming from the east and west to save us until repairs are done.
So there was a tree on fire on a line. National Grid could come through some month and clear the trees off the lines, but maybe too expensive and now enough manpower? I don’t know.
But I DO know we have a local person of sane and reasonable mind who was able to get the crews working on this ASAP, saving up to three hours of waiting.
And I do know the village crews went around and did the dirty work. All of the little sewage substations in the village have generator backups. But if they didn’t work or when they fired up the system didn’t cooperate, you would see the results coming the wrong way out of your toilet.
So the village employees opened locked gates, opened locked manholes and went down underground where the heat and smell ain’t pretty, just to make sure our waste goes to the waste water treatment plant.
If we get power by 3, it’s cause we got good people around here. It might be longer. But National Grid crews are repairing the line as you read this!
