One thing we had to deal with was the power pole in the middle of our yard; it would need to be moved for two reasons. First, if left alone it would end up a foot or two outside our kitchen window, and that just would not do. One does not wish to stand at one’s sink, washing dishes after an elegant dinner of foie gras and lobster, and look out the window at an upright log of oil-soaked, pressure-treated something-or-other. Second, it would interfere with the crane’s ability to lift the three containers from the ground onto their concrete piers.
Before the electric utility could move the pole, they had to trim a bunch of trees across the road. The power on our pole comes from a main line over there, and the new placement would change where the line goes through the trees. A benefit of being in an electric cooperative in rural Mississippi is that all this work cost us only about $300.
It turned out that the pole did not have to be moved right away after all. Mr. Adcocks, the crane operator, told us he’d be able to maneuver just fine. But the power line did have to be taken down.
In an ideal situation, there would be long, leisurely stretches of time between the various steps of power-pole movement. We could disconnect the wire leading to the existing house, then move the power pole to its new location, then reconnect power to the old house. We have to live there, after all, while construction progresses on the containers.
But this wasn’t an ideal situation. The crane, which would lift the container up from the yard and onto the concrete piers, was set to arrive in the morning of the Monday after Thanksgiving. We could have had the electric company come out the day before Thanksgiving to disconnect the wire from our house—Magnolia Electric Power is nothing if not accommodating—but that would have meant five days without electricity. So we arranged to have the power company come out the first thing Monday…a short bit before the crane was scheduled to arrive. A real short bit.
In hindsight…
We cut things too close. A mixup on the part of the electric company meant they wouldn’t arrive to disconnect the power line until 9am or so, as opposed to 7am, which we’d been led to expect. Considering that the crane had arrived at 8, we had a problem. I was paying Mr. Adcocks $180 per hour to cool his heels while we waited for Magnolia Electric.
After some increasingly frantic phone calls (by us) to the electric company, their crew arrived a bit after 9 and made quick work of removing the power line.
I called Mr. Adcocks, who was parked a half-mile away, and said, “Come on down.” And in a few minutes he and his 84,000-pound crane lumbered onto our front yard.
