[HALEY]

Power outage disrupted some Mid-Mon Valley Thanksgvings
By Jeff Pikulsky
VALLEY INDEPENDENT
Saturday, November 29, 2008

Buzz up!



Many Mid-Mon Valley residents had to make the best of a dim situation when their electrical power went out Thanksgiving afternoon.

Allegheny Power reported that wires at the company's Fayette City substation failed at about 2:30 p.m., leaving some 3,000 customers in Fayette City, Belle Vernon, North Belle Vernon and Washington Township without power.

The outage ended at about 6 p.m.

The Stasko family, of Belle Vernon, lit candles, used flashlights and congregated in the kitchen during the blackout.

A party of about 10 had to settle for a watered down dinner.

"The turkey was cooked, but everything else wasn't," the head of the house, Ed Stasko, said. "The side dishes weren't there. We ate supper at about 6:30. We usually eat about 3:30."

Stasko said the circumstance made for a more intimate and memorable holiday.

"It was a little bit exciting," he said. "We lit the candles up and gathered in the kitchen. We put a portable heater out and we kept ourselves a little bit warm. It brought us a little bit closer together."

The event reminded Stasko of being snowed in during Thanksgiving one year in the 1950s.

He said this year's holiday will rank among his most memorable.

"It was neat," he said. "It was something we can talk to the kids about a little bit down the road and say, 'Remember the Thanksgiving when the lights went out?"

Stasko said the family gave thanks when the power was restored.

"Everyone let out a hooray," he said.

Stasko said some of his friends and their families decided to go out for dinner when the outage occurred.

That's the option Georgette and James McGavitt took.

The Washington Township couple decided to let someone else do the cooking.

"We ended up eating our Thanksgiving dinner at Denny's," she said with a laugh.

McGavitt said she, fortunately, had a contingency plan.

"My turkey was almost done. I had it in the roaster, but I had no side dishes whatsoever," she said. "I ended up calling all 10 people and told them to forget it."

The McGavitts invited their loved ones over again on Friday for a late Thanksgiving dinner.

The power outage caused a bit of excitement at the Belle Vernon high rise when the fire department was called.

"We had a few cuckoos who overdosed on candles on my floor," resident Mary Farquhar said with a laugh. "The smoke from all the candles set the alarms off."

Farquhar said the high rise is equipped with back up power sources.

She said the outage still put a kink in some of the residents' meal schedules, but not hers.

"I already had mine," she said. "A lot of them had it in the oven. It was interesting."

High rise resident Dorothy Maas said she was visiting her daughter in Charleroi during the outage.

Maas said she didn't hear many horror stories when she returned to the high rise.

"Nobody was worried," she said.