With the heavy snow, dispatchers received many reports of downed power lines and broken tree branches that brought a tsunami of power outages. Like the rest of us today, the folks who live on Moore Lane in southwest Reno woke up in a different world. They didn't get much sleep either. Neighbor Tom Krompetz, who happens to be a Sparks fire chief, told us, "We heard a bunch of cracks. You could hear them. It's like thunder."
He says the big cottonwoods cracked the loudest. Huge limbs littered the ground on this once-quiet street. One of those cracks came right from the big tree on Kay Blakely's front lawn. Her power outage hit early: "I started noticing that our alarm system was beeping, and that's what woke me up at a quarter to 2."
And as the snow piled up overnight and this morning…so did the outages. 18,000 customers were without power at 6:30 this morning, ballooning to 30,000 an hour later in northern Nevada, mostly in Reno and Sparks. NV Energy’s Katie Nannini told us, "The highest that I saw was about 35,000, all weather related."
There were big tree branches down right in front of NV Energy headquarters. How this happened isn't hard to understand. This was very heavy, wet snow, and it came down for hours, piling up on branches and breaking them down.
Back on Moore Lane...it was a school day for 12-year old Cassie Krumpetz, but not a typical one. As she told us, "We have a 2-hour delay. And so I came out and was playing soccer in the snow with my brother," while dad moved around some very heavy snow the old fashioned way. This snow so heavy, the snow blower couldn't do the job. Next door, Mike Blakely told us, "You know when the power goes out, everybody looks out the window to see if everybody's power is out, right?"
Mike Blakely was enjoying some luxury, thanks to his heavy-duty generator: "This is a 15KW, which is enough to power the whole house." Which neighbors relied on for coffee and TV…while they all waited for tree cutters and NV Energy crews to get the power back. It was a very long wait. Many don't understand why the power company can't give an estimate when power is restored. NV Energy’s Nannini said "You know it’s difficult to know, because every situation is different."
Tom Krompetz worked all morning with his shovel, clearing his neighbors drives too. Despite the half-day power outage and a very cold house, he holds no ill will towards this Sierra cement: "It’s an inconvenience, but it's nothing major. I welcome the water, I think we all do. I'll take the shoveling when it comes to the drought situation."
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