Who Needs Power

Well, where do I start. Well yesterday about 5:00 I was up at a friend’s dad’s house and it got really dark and started raining a lot. Then the siren in Massillon went off. They don’t just set it off for just anything in Massillon, it was the tornado Siren. I turned on the weather channel and they were saying tornado warning for Stark County until 6:15 with a possible tornado in Wilmot and in its path was Brewster and Navarre (this was the national weather channel, pretty cool to be famous huh). Anyhow I watched for a while and my dad called and said Cinde called him and said there was no power at the store. I asked if I should come down and he said to just wait. He called back and said he was having trouble getting there because there were trees down everywhere and that I should probably head down. I did and there was water everywhere. Massillon was flooded. I got to 93 towards poorman and traffic was stopped. There was a telephone pole on top of a semi. I turned around and went down Saurbaugh to Pigeon Run. Pigeon Run was horrible, especially past Elton. I was going to go down Elton but there were two big trees right at Pigeon Run and Elton. I kept going down Pigeon Run, and it got worse. Power lines down, trees, everything. I had to drive over trees to keep going. I got onto Boughman street and came in the back way to Brewster. Brewster was a mess, there were trees down everywhere. Kelly wanted me to check on Riley’s Grandma’s house, so I tried to go down her street but couldn’t. Trees everywhere. I turned around and went the other way. I saw they were all out on their porch so I turned around and went to the store. There were people everywhere. Firetrucks from Massillon, Beach City, Wilmot, and North Lawrence were driving around. I went into the store and help get things settled down. It wasn’t long before we learned the power was going to be off for a long time.

We called to get in a generator that could power the entire store. We only needed a 100 kWh, but they didn’t have one so they sent a 230 kWh. Myssi ended up staying and cleaning the deli and afterwards we hung out outside waiting for the generator. It ended up ariving around 11:30. It was huge. It was a CAT diesel generator on a trailer. Around 12:00 Mark Wentling showed up to hook it up. He had it hooked up in not much time, but as we started putting load on it, it kept shutting down. We screwed around with it until like 4:30 and decided we just weren’t going to be able to put the entire store on it. We emptied the island case since it couldn’t be put on there and I ended up leaving about 5:15 AM. I went home and fed the cat and collapsed for a bit. Dad stayed all night to watch the generator. At 6:30 my alarm went off on my phone to get me up. I got a shower in the dark (at least I had hot water though) and shaved in the dark. I got to work about 7:05 to find the generator was still acting up and all kinds of stuff. I ended up spending all day babysitting the generator and getting everything turned back on when it tripped out. I have a huge bruise on my hand from resetting the breaker on the thing, it is enormous and requires a lot of force to do it. It does sound really cool though when it’s starting up :). We called the generator company about it tripping out and they said they would send another one. It came about 12:00 and we swapped them out. The new one didn’t fix the problem. So it just kept tripping out all day. Now I’m here watching it again (it’s been on for three hours+ now, so I’ll keep my fingers crossed). I have to keep rotating compressors so it doesn’t get overloaded and shutdown on me again. Oh well it’s something to do. I’m on duty until 1:00 AM until dad comes in to relieve me. Hopefully I can make it that long.