By DANIEL WINSTON GATTO | Junior Reporter | 11 years old
At around 12:45 a.m. on July 19 a giant evergreen tree fell down onto power lines causing … POWER OUTAGE!!
Mandeville Canyon was drowned in darkness. The only light was the moonlight and even that was very faint. It was as if electricity never even existed in Brentwood.
When my Mom woke up, she couldn’t make coffee, so she was grumpy all morning! On the way to karate camp in the Village, we could see men and women cutting the tree down and repairing the electrical lines.
My Mom was also taking our neighbor to UCLA hospital for an appointment which ended up as a very long lunch because Sunset Blvd was closed! My Mom was trapped at UCLA!
She finally picked us up but we could not get home. I thought we were going to have to live in a sleazy motel. The sad part was the employees of the neighborhood couldn’t work, dog walkers couldn’t help their dogs, parents were late to their destinations but the good news was that there were NO CYCLISTS on Mandeville Canyon Road that day.
We ended up seeing the Spiderman movie as a family and by the time we got back home around 6:45 p.m. the power was ON!
Why the tree fell we may never know, it could have been a Zombie Koala Bear climbing to nibble on the leaves or maybe a chubby squirrel looking for nuts. My Dad said it was probably old age but I think it was the fat squirrel that finally took down the very old tree.
This experience makes me wonder, in an emergency could we function properly without power? Are we prepared? And the bigger question, could our City Officials help the citizens if they were in need?
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