Opinion: My wife and I were driving home from an event in Bellevue last night. We were surprised to find red flares at the intersections and power out on Education Hill. I tuned into Redmond Community/Emergency Response Radio AM 1650 to find out what was happening? Was it a major emergency or fleeting outage? Instead of an emergency update, we were given a taped tour of the City's new downtown buildings, some tourist information, and canned safety news about the proper operation of pellet and wood stoves. I think the power outage was limited to Education Hill and only lasted a couple of hours. But, it would have been nice to know what was going on. AM 1650 is a great idea. Maybe next time.
Read about Redmond's "best kept secret"
Read about Redmond's "best kept secret"
We learned about Redmond Radio in our recent CERT community emergency preparedness class, and even met the single grant funded coordinator behind this effort. The next class starts up tomorrow, April 30th. contact Redmond Fire (425-556-2200) to sign up and more information on this super helpful and instructional class. See Redmond.gov's schedule or the link under your "Timely Topics"
ReplyDeleteI was driving home as well when I saw the lights at Marymoore Park suddenly go dark, then observed all of Avondale in pitch black. This leads me to believe that it was a rather wide outage than just the Education Hill area.
ReplyDeleteI also turned on the radio and didn't hear anything regarding the emergency. It would have been nice, so at least I could know if I should consider turning on the generator or start collecting rainwater buckets from outside for the toilets (no power = the joys of living on a well system).
In any regard, I'm glad it was only an hour or so - and maybe that's why no notice was given - but it would be a nice service to have. The WSDOT uses Twitter to broadcast live emergency updates; it would be great if Redmond could do the same.
Hi Grant - Glad to hear from you again. The use of Twitter by WSDOT is interesting.
ReplyDeleteMy daughter thought the outage lasted closer to 4 hours where we live.