Life in the Palouse

Life in the Palouse this time of year is beyond beautiful. The green rolling hills are a sight to see by those local folks and those who live far away.

We take many amenities for granted here. We turn on our water and it pours out clean into our homes. We flush our toilets and don’t ever worry about where it goes. We turn on our electricity and never think twice about whether the lights will turn on or not.

But then what if our lights don’t turn on? What if our power to our home is out when we get home late at night?

Fortunately we have local Avista representatives to answer the call ! Last Monday at 10:00 pm when we got home half of our house lights worked and half didn’t. We went to the breaker box and switched off and on all of the breakers, but no luck. We looked at each other -what should we do ? We met a great young man recently who lives in Colfax and works for Avista. We hate to call people late at night, but this time we just had to as it was apparent there was an outside power issue. So we called our friend, Matt Swan, our local Avista representative. Matt answered his phone on the first ring and he arrived at our house within 15 minutes in his Avista truck and gear, and was ready to roll. We told him that the repair could wait until the next day, that it didn’t appear to be an emergency.

But Matt exclaimed that Avista doesn’t do business that way. The customer’s needs must be met, not later but sooner.

So Matt started digging next to our house below the power meter late into the night until the next morning. And it was pretty cold out there!

Matt called his partner, Nick Samuels, from Palouse to come help, and Nick was there in 30 minutes. Then Matt called his Pullman crew full of three hardworking power professionals. The crew installed a temporary portable transformer to get the correct voltage back to our house.

Matt’s manager, Jason Johnson, from Pullman, gave him permission to get Dave Curry construction from the L-C Valley to postpone a job to show up early Thursday morning at our house to directional bore a 2 inch continuous conduit to our meter base to allow Avista to install a new URD service to our house.

So we had a new power line installed the modern way.

We were so lucky to have Matt and his team on our side!

But the story doesn’t end there. As a result of the voltage surges, Trudy discovered our garage freezer was knocked out of order.

Trudy made a mad dash to get our frozen food to our great neighbor Stephanie’s freezer. So we called another good friend Jake Hahn to make a mad dash to fix a freezer. Jake was just leaving for a family trip to Yakima but would make a quick stop to try to diagnose the problem. He got to our home asap and figured out the freezer needed a new part.Jake said he would get us back in operation on Mother’s Day, and he did. What a great effort Jake!!

And that folks is why we live in Colfax !!

Gary & Trudy Libey

Colfax, WA