During a call out overtime assignment on an otherwise uneventful Thursday evening Mike got a call to respond to what he was told would be a broken pole trouble job atop a hillside overlooking the city of Charleston. Upon arriving at the job site Mike noticed several State Troopers, Local Police and Fire Department vehicles all with lights flashing. Mike felt this was a hell of a response to a simple trouble call, but as he drove up closer to the vehicles he could not believe what he was seeing.

No less than 9 consecutive 45 foot electrical poles had been uprooted from the ground and were now leaning toward the ridge overlooking the city. The crossarms and all the other pole top hardware was still in place with no sign that any of the poles were broken, in fact the wire was still attached to all 9 poles..It was as if something had lifted the poles from the ground as easy as you would pull wooden stakes from your garden, then sat them on edge along the ridge. Mike was well aware that these poles were buried 5 to 6 feet in the ground and that any type of tornado force winds that could lift 9 consecutive poles from the ground would have surely snapped a couple of the poles in half, or at the very least broken off the hardware and wire from the pole tops. There wasn't even evidence of the surrounding trees being damaged.

Mike had no explanation for what could have done this, or why?. The Power Company never issued any official explanation for this strange event, they merely reset the poles in the ground and acted as if this was just another overtime trouble assignment.....

For our cousin Mike it was without question the strangest thing he had ever witnessed in 30 years of line work.