Tuesday's Power Outage

I happened to be coming back from a business meeting around 5 p.m. on Tuesday.  My phone rings and it is a good friend who was in downtown Lake Worth - getting ready, she thought, to eat at one of our dining establishments.  She said that the power was out and wondered if I had power at my house, which I didn't know at the time since I wasn't there.  She said that people were wondering, customers and the restaurant's management, how long it would be, whether they should stay and whether the place should stay open, or send their employees home.  She had already called the city's outage "hot line" number and all it said is that there was an outage in the Eden Place area of the city and power would be on at 3 p.m.  I met up with her yesterday and we called the "hot line" number again and it had the same message from the day before.  And this is after the outage.

It turns out that she stayed a while longer, with the other customers staring at each other and the management, wondering what to do.  I won't name names, but someone playing the role of "Town Crier"
was going door to door in the downtown, including this restaurant, barging into the establishment and yelling that the problem was at the main plant, that is was bad and transformers were tripping all over town.  My friend also had called a Commissioner, the one mentioned in the PB Post article from yesterday, and the Commissioner promised to get back with her on the cause and about how long the power would be out.  She never called back.

So, we had a situation in our downtown on Tuesday in the hour leading up to peak dinner time, where businesses didn't know whether to open or close, customers didn't know whether to stay or go and no information was coming from the city - which left a vacuum that was filled by someone hysterically running through town making up what was happening.

By the way, earlier today the message from the outage "Hot Line" was the same as it has been for the past three days, at least.