Bob Wooten: Out of the dark that covers us

The first sign of trouble was a flicker in the overhead lights.

It was just before noon on Tuesday when the fluorescents started to blink here at The Northern Virginia Daily. Once, twice, then a third time, and then they were done. My office and the newsroom outside my door had become dark and quiet.

Remarkably quiet, in fact. No traffic crackled over the police scanner. No calls blared over the paging system. No printers were spitting out hard copies of our work. The TV in my office, normally turned to CNN to monitor breaking news, was a blank.

And the only lights working upstairs were the emergency units that snapped on as soon as the power failed. And we were the lucky ones: The news department has windows and it was a bright, sunny day.

I'm told at least one employee was working in the basement of our Strasburg office when the lights went out. I can only imagine how unnerving that was considering the lower level of the building is gloomy even when the lights are on. What's more, it's also home to the "morgue," the room where the newspaper's archives are kept. Cue the creepy music.

We soon learned the cause of the outage: A tractor-trailer turning from East King Street onto South Funk Street had snagged a utility pole. That brought down poles and wires, started a house fire, and shut off power for about 1,400 Shenandoah Valley Electric Co-operative customers.

The driver apparently overlooked the "No semis" signs posted on Funk.

Without question, the homeowner and trucker had the worst of it Tuesday, but the incident brought home how utterly dependent we all are on the electrical grid.

For more than three hours Tuesday, we were almost completely dead in the water. I couldn't edit stories, mark up page proofs or check email. In fact, I couldn't even post a story about the outage on our own website (nvdaily.com) because our computer servers were down. Fortunately, our online guru, Linda Ash, managed to post some details on Facebook and Twitter.

The longer the outage went, the more it seemed as though we might be facing a crisis when deadline rolled around.

A couple of news staff members moved over to the classified department, a section of the building that oddly kept power because it's served by a different line. That let them keep working on laptops.

I was about ready to join them -- the battery on my own laptop was dangerously low -- when the lights finally came back to life. That led to a collective sigh of relief.
Thanks to some great work by our staff, especially the technology department and copy desk, the press rolled when it needed to Tuesday night.
The general assessment the next day was that the outage could have been much worse.
In fact, it occurred to me that the crash could have happened Sunday afternoon, just ahead of the Giants-Patriots kickoff in Super Bowl XLVI. That would have been a real crisis.
• Bob Wooten is the managing editor of the Daily. Contact him at 800-296-5137 or at bwooten@nvdaily.com.