Crazy Stable

 Last night, we tried to fall asleep listening to the following instruments in the CrazyStable Winter Symphony:

* Bitter winds howling outside.

* Steam hissing inside.

* Downstairs Evil Radiator clanking and whamming, loudly.

* Loose piece of vinyl window cladding on third floor thwack-thwack-thwacking against frame.

* "Jumper" cable strung across street from lamppost scritch-scritching against shingles of house as it sways amid the turbulent branches of the Ent. No lights flickered, thank God, and we never had to break out the whale blubber lamps.

(Did I mention how much we love winter?)

Coming up next: We get estimates from asbestos abatement guys on exorcising the basement. Nice stuff, asbestos; not only good insulation, but damned quiet on a windy night. 

Image: The Endurance 

In the course of dealing with the explosion and blackout, we  have learned far more about our century-old electrical service than we ever wanted to know. And today, we got more bad news.

Every watt and volt we consume passes through
this ancient service box tucked in a dark corner of our dismal basement. Last week, the Con Ed guy explained that our pseudo-electricians, who rewired the CrazyStable when we first moved in 21 years ago, had hooked the new wiring up to the old "service"--the wires that come in from the street. Furthermore, they ran the wires in "the gap"--the space between this box and the new circuit-breaker box--through an almost-as-ancient fuse box, for reasons unexplainable. Once we had the new service, he advised, we should get a real electrician to close this gap of stupidity.

[Yes, I know: Why did we use pseudo-electricians to begin with? Because they were cheap and we were broke after buying our 3,000-square-foot piece of paradise, which was sizzling with wires so old that they were insulated with fabric, and ran alongside gas lines. In the very early 1900s, no one was certain that this new-fangled electricity was going to work out. ]

Right now, the temporary cable from the lamp-post, our "jumper service," is joined to these scary stubs with black electrical tape.  Today, more Con Ed guys showed up, to replace the wires under the street. (Every time we hear a high wind, we marvel at the genius of buried electrical cable; you just don't appreciate it until you're the only one on the block whose juice is swinging in the breeze overhead.) But when they inspected the scary basement, something unfortunate happened: They noticed our basement monster.

He's been there since the beginning, and mostly he slumbers. He would never harm anyone unless some damn fool goes and disturbs him, and even then he's unlikely to kill anyone. There are, in fact, only a few scattered bits of him left; the rest has disappeared mysteriously. But even those poor rotten, tattered remnants strike such unreasoning fear in the hearts of men that they flee from our basement, wild-eyed and calling for their supervisor.

I speak, of course, of our asbestos pipe insulation.  I suppose it was pretty dumb of us to leave a few chunks of it hanging down like a beaded curtain in front of the closet-like enclosure that holds the circuit breakers. If we had sensibly wet it and eased it off and hidden it deep in a black plastic bag on its way to the landfill, perhaps our monster might slumber still. But noooo. Medical writer that I am, I've always insisted on leaving it undisturbed until the distant glorious day when we can afford a proper abatement or encapsulation job. (Meanwhile, we simply stay out of the basement, as any sane person would.) That day, until this week, was estimated to occur in about the year 2015. Now it has to happen within two months, which is how long Con Ed will leave the Extension-Cord-on-Steroids hanging over our house. We have to produce an air testing certificate attesting to the monster's banishment, and that means banishing him. Early estimates suggest that this will require the sale of only one of our kidneys, not all of them (we have a total of six, so some will be left for the roof).

Old house owners are fond of referring to "the mushroom effect" when one repair starts a sort of chain reaction of decrepititude and collapse. We've got a basement full of mushrooms, real expensive ones, Shiitaki or oyster ones, and they are not done proliferating.

Juliet: O now be gone; more light and light it grows.

Romeo: More light and light; more dark and dark our woes! 

                           --Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Scene V
 

Do you know how many years since journalism school that I have waited to write a headline like that? And it was true! Nobody got hurt, the lights are back on, but it was all way too much excitement to kick off February.

At noon or so, the lights started to flicker--hard. We've always had a few cranky circuits, but this was everywhere. Then, from down in the street, a concussive boomph, followed by car alarms going off. It's a funny thing, an explosion--the sound is pretty unmistakable. I ran downstairs to find acrid smoke and Roman candles issuing from the manhole cover directly in front of our house, and called 911.

 My mind kept rerunning our killer steampipe explosion here in New York last summer, and racing over what to do if I had to evacuate. Alone in the house, I got out the big carrier and rounded the 3 cats up into one room. Within about 2 minutes, Da Pride a Flatbush and at least one other company were at my doorstep with pikestaffs, canisters, axes, and a portable CO detector. After marching down to the basement and ascertaining that all was well, they waited on the porch out of the heavy rain for Con Edison to come and deal with what was apparently a fire in the buried cables. They were all absolutely adorable and some looked impossibly young; I offered them coffee, which they politely declined.  Gosh, I wish I could have made them coffee.

What followed was a Tale of Three Trucks. Con Ed arrived, in a zippy red emergency truck ; guys in lime-green suits lifted two manhole covers and were jolted by another pooooof of smoke. They dug around like dentists probing a filling, and assured me that they'll fix 'er up and we won't even lose power. Then--the power cut out, only in our house, not the neighbors'; turns out the damage down there was worse than they thought. "I know what you're thinking," said the taller of the guys in a lilting Jamaican accent, accompanied by a broad smile. "You're thinking, 'Why me?'" Uh-huh. It's beyond the power of the Red Truck, he tells me; they will have to dispatch the Bucket Truck, whose crew will hook up a temporary line to the streetlamp across the street. Okay, this works; we know, because back in the '80's, the local crack dealer did something similar after they turned off his power and boarded up his house.

As I waited for the Bucket Truck, I kept thinking of ways to pass the time, since my computer was, as the haiku stated, "but a simple stone." I could vacuum!--er, no. I could do some laundry!--ah, no. I could read! Not really; the house was sepulchrally dark on this dismal day. It was also preternaturally quiet; I became oddly aware of it around me as a big, inert wooden box, without its thrumming neurons underneath.

 Soon the Bucket Truck arrived, and the stringing-up of Crackhead Electrical Service unfolded: A line was run to the basement, lifted up to the lamppost, then swagged against the second floor of our house to keep it airborne.   

Meanwhile, down in the basement, a seasoned guy named Eddie spliced the line to our ancient electrical service box. Turns out that when the pseudo-electricians rewired the house 20 years ago, they never replaced anything beyond our exterior walls. The wires between the street cable and our box, Eddie said, were encased in "lead sack," something not commonly used after about 1910. Sounds about right; so our juice has been running underground on the original wires for a century. I asked Eddie if he and the other guys hadn't been breathing lead-contaminated smoke just now. He shrugged. "After what we all breathed on 9-11, y'know? What're ya gonna do?"

Finally, the lights came on, and it was clean-up time. Up comes a big tanker truck with a gigantic flexible hose and a smaller tank, labeled "fresh water." This is the manhole vacuum. (Oh, that phrase should get some good Google hits.) After the explosion, the manhole is full of mud and toxic debris; one guy shoots down pressurized water through a wand, while the other one sucks out crud with the monster vacuum. At this point, my inner 5-year-old simply surrendered to the oversized Tonka-toyness of it all.

All that remains is for Con Ed to schedule the surgery for installing new permanent line from the street to the house. They claim (I paraphrase) that this can be done laparoscopically, without an open incision in our hardscaping.  They also said we wouldn't lose power today. More on that as it happens, and more very soon on the Bizarro World of Wiring that Eddie discovered in the basement.

Many hours later, describing the day's excitement to Spouse, I said the words "emergency truck" and felt a wave of memory. When I was very little, somehow my dad and I developed a bedtime story ritual involving "Truck Stories." I would beg for them, and my father, the ultimate Tool-Time Guy, would weave a yarn involving lost kids, burning or collapsing buildings, gas leaks, and lots of fairly technical rescue equipment. He did tales about fire trucks and police trucks but my favorite of all was the emergency truck; no matter how much peril those kids were in, the guys would pull out some amazing gizmo and save the day. And then he'd kiss me goodnight, but I'd be too excited to sleep.