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Lopez Island didn't have any outages from the storm. Jim Gardner, our General Foreman over there, says he is starting to feel like the Maytag repair man (he will live to regret those words). San Juan Island had one significant outage that required turning off power to other portions of the island so that repairs could be made. I had a call from one of our members on Crane Island who called just to let me know that for the first time in his memory (which probably goes back a long way), Crane didn't lose power during a wind storm. We can take some credit for that because over the past several years we have buried all of the power lines on Crane. Now we have to concentrate on the power lines on Shaw that serve Crane. As usual, Orcas was worst hit and our crews worked until 5:00 a.m. restoring power to our members. Unfortunately some of our Orcas members got lost in the transfer of information. At least one of our members who was still without power Wednesday morning told us that, with all of what he had seen on TV about the storm, when his power went off he figured the whole island was out and he would just wait until his power came back on. The moral of this is that you should call us every couple of hours while your power is off. You need to keep trying if our phone lines are busy. We have added additional lines and a recorder so we can answer more than one phone line at a time. We will soon expand the number of lines to our recording so we can answer more calls. As was the case on one outage on Orcas, we had a problem in Deer Harbor that also affected the Pole Pass area. When we fixed the Deer Harbor outage we thought that would fix the Pole Pass outage, but there was a second outage we didn't hear about for a long time. The first 15 or 20 minutes after an outage are the busiest on the telephone and it is also the time when we have the least information to share with you. A hour into an outage is a good time to call because we will have established the scope of the outage and have some information on when repairs will be made to share with you. Let's keep our fingers crossed and hope that our weather turns calm for awhile. I wouldn't mind a little less rain. A little cold weather wouldn't hurt our revenues either. Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year to all of our members.
Doug Bechtel
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