No power - no problem

[P1h3r1e3d13]

Last night (2/18) just after 10:00, team 295 was looking forward to another night of working at school until we were too tired to be safe with power tools when the power flickered and went out. We waited under dim emergency lighting 'til we ran out of justifications for staying "just 5 more minutes." At 10:30 or 10:45 we disbanded for our first full nights of sleep in recent history, figuring the power would be back by the time we met this morning after church (11:00am).

Of course, it wasn't. For an hour or so we ran all over the empty school, borrowing flashlights and chasing crisis response binders and staff phone trees. Per Murphy's Law, though, all that information was on computers, and even though we finally found a laptop with battery power, we couldn't log on because the school's servers were down. After the electric company informed us that the whole block was out and they had no idea what the problem was, we started calling everyone we knew who might have a gas-powered generator, but none did. (Three cell phone companies had brought generators to run the cell antennas on our stadium's light towers, but we decided against trying to "borrow" their power ) Just before we were going to leave for the equipment rental place, our last call turned up a friend's small generator. We picked it up and filled the gas tank, and are now working again, under the glare of halogen work lights.

Didn't FIRST delay the ship date for the east coast teams that had that huge power outage a year or two ago?


I'll try to post a few pictures later.



(posted [now that our power and internet are back] on behalf of non-CD-ing team members)