No Seriously Can I Borrow a Cup of Electricity?

Share News:

electricityThe good news is this week’s Wednesday WTF is being written. The bad news is it’s being written from a hotel room next to a strip club because home base has no electricity.

You think I’m kidding, but Monday when we couldn’t find any restaurants open, my sweet innocent child said from the backseat, “Oh look, Mom! There’s a buffet at that place. If they’re open we can go have lunch.”

electricity

So yeah, that was a whole thing.

Anyway, we spent Sunday night believing Oncor when it said we would have electricity by 5 p.m. Then 6 p.m. Then 9 p.m., then WTF PM ARE YOU DOING OUT THERE? And we were all trying to be very zen about it. We spent time outside. We filled up the wading pool. We ate popsicles.

But around midnight, with all of us sleeping in separate beds because all of us needed to starfish for maximum circulation, it became clear that Oncor knew as much as we did about the electrical grid of the Dallas Metropolitan Statistical Area.

And then at 5 a.m. when I awoke to a phone call from Oncor and realized I was hugging my once-frozen water bottle, and that Oncor was telling me my electricity wouldn’t be back on until midnight … June 11, that things weren’t just going sideways, they had done just fell down.

So I did what anyone would do, and booked a hotel near a strip club for two nights.

At any rate, I can’t help but feel that it would be easier for me to be more prepared for the next major outage than to convince Oncor to be more prepared for the next major outage, so I remembered that Jo England had, last week, when the worst thing I had to worry about was how long it would take to count the ballots Saturday, messaged me a listing that now, in retrospect, I wish I had taken out an additional mortgage for.

(Sidebar: Hey, remember when we had a runoff election? Man, Sunday was a whole week, it feels like.)

Anyway, here’s this great house on Possum Kingdom Lake.

I’m just going to let the listing speak for itself here:

“MAGNIFICENT PANORAMIC LAKE VIEWS plus a 1000 sq ft emergency fallout shelter below! UNIQUE COMBINATION of resort style lake home and a fully planned out bunker for the survivalist: water storage in 4 tanks for up to 12,000 gallons; enough MRE and dehydrated food to feed 12 people for 10 years; built in air purification system; and back up generator fed by a 1000 gallon propane tank; 18 Dual Tracking solar panels store energy in battery system in the garage. Upstairs, over all of this, are 3 oversized bedrooms, upscale finish out, open concept living areas and a putting green outside the back patio. Additionally, this gated development has a gorgeous community pool, lake cabin, and watercraft launch to boot!”

Guys. BACK UP GENERATOR FED BY 1,000 GALLON PROPANE TANK. SOLAR PANELS.

What seemed overboard last week now sounds pretty damned smart. This isn’t a What the F, it’s a Why the F Would You Not.

Not to mention, it’s a pretty nice house even without the bunker.

Anyway, do you have power? When did you get it back if you do? If you don’t, are you murdery yet? Sound off in the comments!

Want to see more photos? Click here.

Posted in

Bethany Erickson lives in a 1961 Fox and Jacobs home with her husband, a second-grader, and Conrad Bain the dog. If she won the lottery, she'd by an E. Faye Jones home.
She's taken home a few awards for her writing, including a Gold award for Best Series at the 2018 National Association of Real Estate Editors journalism awards, a 2018 Hugh Aynesworth Award for Editorial Opinion from the Dallas Press Club, and a 2019 award from NAREE for a piece linking Medicaid expansion with housing insecurity.
She is a member of the Online News Association, the Education Writers Association, the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, and the Society of Professional Journalists.
She doesn't like lima beans or the word moist.

10 Comments

  1. Joanna England on June 12, 2019 at 11:13 am

    I’ll go in halfsies on this place just to have a spot to run away to when the power goes out! Deal?

  2. Alex Darian on June 12, 2019 at 11:29 am

    I cannot get enough of Candy, Jo and the whole real estate/politic kerfuffle! Y’all seriously need your own show on telly, or at least a podcast! Like coffee, I have to have it every morning! Love you crazy gals that are full of valuable info (and entertainment!!!)

    • Candy Evans on June 13, 2019 at 1:01 am

      Did you say coffee? I went three whole days without. I licked the instant crystals… oh dear, that’s not crystal meth, is it?

    • Joanna England on June 13, 2019 at 2:11 pm

      Ha! Thanks! We have a lot of fun here! Bethany really brings the jokes, too!

  3. Sharon on June 12, 2019 at 1:32 pm

    It’s day 4 and Oncor is really jacking with us in the 75228 zip code and particularly Far East Dallas by the DAC. After updates to the power on change in time for a day, it went to unknown to today still determining to it’ll be on in 30 minutes, 3 hours later still not on, to a text that said restored ( that went to all of our neighbors), and we still have no power. I’m murdery to Oncor and would like to start my own solar company with my own delivery units that go directly to the house. This morning I seriously told my husband we should just buy a motorhome that way when the real apocalypse happens we have our own self generated home on wheels with everything we need and we can get the heck out of Dodge! This house is pretty awesome but not for me. I want my bunker in the mountains, by a lake or beach!

    • Joanna England on June 13, 2019 at 2:10 pm

      We have seen Alabama Power trucks on restoration calls all through the area, so keep your fingers crossed! I know this is hard. We just got power back and it has been really hard to get our acts back on track after Sunday. Hang in there!

  4. Candy Evans on June 13, 2019 at 1:03 am

    Our’s went on yesterday at 3, then went off tonight, then on again. The Oncor guys are on our street but they said they don’t know why it is going out. Man that house looks great… Possum Kingdom here we come!

    • Lee Grahm on June 13, 2019 at 4:34 am

      You did not offer them any “bonuses” so that they would figure out faster?

  5. Robert W McAtee on June 14, 2019 at 4:59 pm

    I gotta say, it’s impressive for Oncor to lose so many substation transformers in one go when no other area was similarly affected. It makes one wonder how many of those units were at or past their rated service life (my guess, all of them) and it leads me to believe that there were no replacements on hand.

    Oncor’s folks work hard but they are managed terribly and this storm made that obvious.

    • LonestarBabs on June 15, 2019 at 7:52 am

      In our corner of NE Dallas County we’ve had transformers go out well after the storm. The majority of our area is serviced by Garland Power & Light and there were no outages at all. But the pockets of neighborhoods that are Oncor/TXU customers have experienced power outages that did not occur until a few days after the storm as individual transformers blew.

Leave a Comment