Remember to close the door behind you

One of the linemen went home early with an ankle injury so I spent today helping the one remaining lineman on station get the power lines up for the NY Air National Guard buildings out by the airport.

This, of course, meant I was back out on the sea ice today. The high winds out on the ice blew up snow in a haze that made it hard to see farther than a few hundred yards around but when we looked up we could see blue sky. At one point the sun lit up all the airborne snow and the entire sky was gold. With my amber sungoggles on the white sky over and piles of snow made by bulldozers looked reddish like pictures from Mars.

When the lineman was getting ready to connect the last cable he had me go into all of the buildings and make sure the breakers were all off. Simple enough task. Simple, that is, if there hadn't been a blizzard last week that blew fine particles of snow through any crack in the buildings.

One building had its entryway completely filled with snow through a crack above the door. To get in I had to throw all my weight against the door several times, stick a pry-bar in between the door and its jamb and then scoop out the snow from behind it a spoonfull at a time. (I keep a spoon sticking out of my parka's sleeve pocket so I can tell which Big Red parka is mine on the coat racks) In all I spent two hours opening the door and cleaning out the snow from inside.

After that I found another building with a huge pile of snow in front of the breaker panel. Foutunately that one had a back door and I could climb around the snow to get to the breaker. (Picture above)