Yesterday morning, just outside the Coca-Cola plant a large truck backed in to some power lines causing a power outage in the Kerns neighbourhood for over 3 hours.

When assessing the damage and viewing that the pole has completely snapped off from it’s base, it’s quite a wonder that the maintainence crews were able to get power back online so quickly – so credit to them.

The power outage caused chaos in peoples homes, but mostly on the surrounding streets where the intersection lights went down. As you would expect, this caused chaotic traffic james with an every man for himself policy rather than people waiting their turn.

People should remember, that according to ODOT regulation, a flashing red light should be treated the same as a stop sign. It is not a signal to drive as fast as you can, hoping that someone is not cutting across your path.

As you can see, Coca Cola has some very large loading docks, which are not really close to powerlines at all, so it is quite confusing (and clearly driver error) how they managed to hit the pole. Furthermore, the lines are very high up, so any truck trying to get in to the loading bay will easily be able to fit under the shutter before it ever got close to the lines.