Barging in for repairs

Time was, we'd have multiple power cuts a day, and it just didn't make sense to reset all the digital displays, so 12:00 became the metronome of island life (though it's always 5 o'clock somewhere).

But City Electric -- oops, now it's gone all 20th Century and become Keys Energy Services -- still blinks out pretty regularly. Sometimes it's a car hitting a pole way up the road. Sometimes it's just an old transformer giving up the ghost. But they're usually fixed in minutes.

And then there was the four-hour gap the other night. Everything died, and the city was quiet except for motorcycles -- no hum of air-conditioners, no running pumps, no nada. We had candles on the front porch, and Robert rambled out to reconnoiter, coming back to announce that the 801 had generators and a festive crowd.

But I was puzzled: four hours? I understood better a few days later, when the Citizen published a picture of the bucket-truck-on-a-barge chimera that had to be assembled to patch the overwater line behind Hilton Haven.