It was 5:30 on the Sunday afternoon of Thanksgiving weekend when the lights went out, abruptly and completely. It’s pretty much night time around here at 5:30 PM in late November and so we were, as they say, plunged into darkness.
I had just been thinking that it was probably time to cook dinner. I knew what I was going to make, which is, for me, half the battle. It’s like writing - if I know what I’m going to cook, or what I want to write about, then the rest comes pretty easily. But last Sunday at dinner time, the early dinner planning availed me nothing, because not only was my kitchen completely dark, I also have an electric range.
“We’ll give it half an hour,” I said. “If the lights aren’t back on by 6:00 or maybe 6:15, then we’ll get in the car and go eat out.” Not gonna lie - I was hoping that the lights would stay out because I love going out for dinner.
We decided that we’d go to Villa Maya, a Rockville neighborhood favorite. Then my son looked up from his phone. His girlfriend, who lives about two miles from our house and around the corner from Villa Maya, had just texted him that power was out on her street, too.
“Well,” I said. “No point going to Villa Maya - if they don’t have power they can’t serve food and if they do have power, then the whole neighborhood is going to descend on them.” Then, as if on cue, my phone started to blow up.
"What's going on?" "Do you have power?" "Our lights just went out - what about you?" One friend had been away for the holiday weekend, and she arrived home at 5:45 to find that the entire neighborhood was pitch dark. Another texted that he was on his way home from picking up a kid from a friend's house, and that the traffic lights were out on Georgia Avenue from Olney all the way to Silver Spring. This is a long distance, about five miles or so, and this text was my first clue that this was a bigger deal than our average normal neighborhood power failure.
We all started scrolling and didn't see anything on social media or news sites, not right away. I called Pepco and got their usual outgoing voice message. Then my husband turned on the battery powered radio and tuned to the local all-news station, where we finally heard the first report that a small plane had crashed into a high-voltage tower, taking out power to the entire eastern half of Montgomery County.
We all naturally assumed that the crash had killed the plane's occupants, and we were sad for their families. Then we heard the unbelievable news that the pilot and passenger were still alive in the plane, which was entangled in power lines, half stuck in the tower and half dangling, over 100 feet in the air.
I couldn’t even imagine how terrified those poor people must have been. They must have been sure that they were about to die in one of several horrible ways. They could have been electrocuted 100 feet in the air. The plane could have exploded, or it could have plunged to the ground. All three of those things could have happened, really. So many dreadful possibilities that must have seemed all but inevitable to the people trapped in that tiny cockpit. Terrifying.
But as it turns out, death was not at all inevitable. If you follow the news, you know that the two people actually survived after seven fearful hours suspended in midair in the wrecked plane. First responders from Montgomery County and the state of Maryland and the Potomac Electric Power Company got the people out, got the remains of the plane out of the tower, and restored power to almost 100,000 people. They did all of this in about seven hours, in darkness and fog.
*****
Sunday evening is really not a bad time to lose electric power. We had candles and flashlights and a radio and plenty of no-need-to-cook food to eat, and the evening was very pleasant. The power was restored at midnight and so I went to sleep knowing two things: The plane crash victims had survived, and I’d be able to make coffee on Monday morning. Win and win.
*****
People can be the worst. We really suck sometimes. But when we are good, we are very very good. And this is when we’re good. When a human is in danger, there are no lengths to which other humans won’t go to save their lives.
Later, I read a news story about the pilot. This was not his first plane crash. He crashed another small plane in 1992. Thirty years later, he chose to fly his small plane from New York to Maryland at dusk in already dangerously low-visibility conditions. By his own admission, he knew that the fog made flying dangerous. By his own admission, he was flying too low. I stopped reading at that point. I didn’t want to know if he had some compelling reason to endanger his life and the life of his passenger and the lives of anyone on the ground who happened to be underneath his plane had it happened to fall to the ground or if his decision to fly that day was driven by selfish hold-my-beer look-at-me-I’m-a-pilot bravado. Of course, I’m happy that his life was spared. But that doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be any consequences for his actions.
*****
And so while some people risked their own lives to save two people in danger, others endanger the lives of innocent people in order to make a stupid political point. Last week’s power outage was an accident, as far as we know. What happened in North Carolina yesterday was by all accounts not an accident. I hope that people there won’t be in the dark for too long. I hope that the pilot who entangled himself in a high-voltage tower in Maryland loses his pilot’s license, and I hope they catch the people who sabotaged the grid in North Carolina.
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