Dispatch probably aims to have crews restore power to the most people per hour of initial work, targeting the grid that way, and then to later restore smaller islands of outage. There probably also is a strategy to work from key feeder points near the transmission-line-to-distribution-grid point(s) outward, as following the trunk of a tree through branches to individual leaves.
I was told by Connexus people at a meeting, that the distribution grid has been basically sound, but that the Great River production site feeder line, the transmission line, is the critical point in Connexus operation. The grid runs along street rights-of-way, and from it there is private service wiring to individual parcels, via private stub lines. I am aware of at least one situation where one pole on Ramsey Blvd. has a now-undergrounded run of private service wire of perhaps an eighth to a quarter mile, near a property line, where outage and other considerations caused the utility to choose to underground the line at Connexus' expense, not the ratepayers paying more for that servicing decision. It enhanced reliability of service and Connexus should be credited for such a decision. Our neighborhood has overhead distribution, while my understanding is that in newer developments in Ramsey it is required that underground distribution be installed as part of subdivision, platting and development.
The home computer network is on a UPS, so the three stations stayed on after the power went out along our block - a half mile stretch - at about 10:30 PM, Sunday. Two of the three stations have the monitor on the UPS too, but I do not. Two were able to be shut down in an orderly way. I simply powered down.
10:35 AM, Monday, today, power was restored. The water tank had held enough, and the fridge door was not opened, and 12 hours is a reasonable time. Where damage was more extensive in other storms over the last few years restoring power took longer. There were no apparent downed trees or large fallen limbs in the neighborhood. Just an outage, without knowing how extensive, or whether it was related to storm impact at the Sunfish-Alpine intersection which is being worked on and has been worked on for a month or so. Work remains incomplete with that intersection closed.
Firefox, the browser, in restarting gave an error message that the user profile was "in use" (because of the disorderly shut-down). It has an override option in the message window, and it booted into a "restore session" screen. Doing the restore, it appears no open tabs were lost, the state of the data was preserved, and the system survived the shutdown and restart in as orderly a way as feasible.
The phone land line remained active. DSL was working up to loss of power. That part of things was error-free.
Bottom line: Connexus did well, and deserves praise for effectiveness of the work crews and the dispach planning. When the power quits, the well will not work and the water supply is key, as is the refrigerator-freezer. In half a day, no problems. An extended outage would hit hardest on water supply and in winter, on the furnace. The heat exchanger in a gas furnace is touchy, and that is why the blower continues running after the flame's stopped. If a furnace cycle is interrupted by a power failure with a hot heat exchanger, it can be a problem.
