He Stood in That Intersection for 40 Hours
When the Bellhaven substation failed, every light in Port Alden went dark. One man walked to the worst intersection in town and stayed there.
Brandon Cowen spent 40 hours directing traffic at Dunmore Street and Third Avenue over three days last week, hand-signaling cars through the busiest intersection in town after the Bellhaven substation failed and took every traffic light in Port Alden down with it.
He was not asked to do it. He was not paid.
He was not, according to Port Alden police, technically allowed to do it either.
The windstorm came ashore just after 11 p.m. Thursday. By 1 a.m. Friday, roughly 19,000 Lakeshore Hydro customers were out. That included all 34 signalized intersections inside city limits.
Cowen, 30, walked to Dunmore and Third at about 6 a.m. Friday in a reflective vest he keeps behind the seat of his truck. He was still standing there Sunday afternoon when the signal head above him blinked back to life.
Brandon Cowen walked there before sunrise
Neighbors on Ferris Street say Brandon Cowen did not announce a plan, call the city, or ask anyone to come with him.
He left his house in the dark with a dented steel thermos of black coffee and a folding camp stool he never sat on, according to two residents who watched him go.
Dunmore and Third is not a complicated intersection. It is just the one that matters. Every ambulance running to Port Alden Regional Medical Centre from the north end of the district comes through it, and so does the shift change for the hospital’s 400-odd employees.
With the lights out, drivers were treating it as a four-way stop. Mostly. Emergency dispatch logged three near-misses there between midnight and 5 a.m., including one involving an ambulance.
Port Alden Regional has since confirmed that no ambulance was held up at Dunmore and Third after 6 a.m. Friday. Before 6 a.m., two were.
“It was a mess and it was about to be a bad mess,” said Dez Halloran, Port Alden’s emergency management coordinator. “Then it just wasn’t anymore. It took me until Friday night to find out why.”
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19,000 customers, and no easy fix
Lakeshore Hydro said a transformer at the Bellhaven substation was damaged beyond a field repair when a section of the switchyard took a direct hit from falling timber. Gusts at Bellhaven Point were clocked at 71 mph.
“This was not a matter of resetting a breaker,” utility spokesperson Rhonda Yee-Aldiss said Sunday. “We were rebuilding a piece of the system while the weather was still on top of us.”
Crews came in from three neighboring cooperatives. Thirty-eight were staged in Port Alden by Sunday morning. Power came back in wedges, the hospital corridor first, the north end last.
Traffic signals came back with the circuits they sit on, which is why Dunmore and Third stayed dark for nearly the entire outage. It sits at the tail of a feeder that was not restored until 3:20 p.m. Sunday.
Public works began setting portable stop signs at intersections Saturday morning and got to eleven of them by dark. Dunmore and Third was not among the eleven.
Halloran said that was a resourcing call rather than an oversight. The crew had been told that intersection was already covered.
Police: not permitted, and extremely useful
Port Alden police had four officers on the road Friday for a city of 28,000 people with no working traffic control anywhere in it.
Department policy is that manual traffic control at a dark signal is a job for a sworn officer or a trained flagger. Port Alden had neither to spare.
Sgt. Ruben Castellanos-Wray said the department knew Cowen was out there by mid-morning.
“What he was doing is, strictly speaking, not something a civilian is permitted to do. It was also the single most useful thing happening at that intersection.”
Sgt. Ruben Castellanos-Wray, Port Alden Police
Castellanos-Wray said he drove past the intersection at 2 a.m. Saturday and kept going.
“I did not stop him,” he said. “I’m not going to stand here and pretend I seriously considered it.”
By Saturday morning, other residents had started rotating in. Retired ferry mechanic Ike Fennimore took the 10 p.m. shift. Tavia Brisbane-Ng and her son covered mid-mornings. Curtis Odom drove over from the Bellhaven side and took two intersections on Third by himself.
Halloran said six volunteers were eventually working three intersections on a schedule someone wrote out on the back of a marine forecast.
“None of that happens if he isn’t standing there at six in the morning on Friday,” Halloran said. “People saw one guy doing it and figured out it was allowed. It wasn’t, but they figured it out.”
He slept in the truck between shifts
Cowen’s truck was parked on the shoulder of Dunmore the entire three days. Neighbors say he slept in it in stretches of two and three hours, then went back out.
Otter, his rescue shepherd mix, was walked twice a day for three days by a neighbor who let herself in with a spare key. She says he has not asked for the key back.
Camille Ostrander, an ICU nurse at Port Alden Regional, passed through the intersection six times across four shifts.
“Every single time, same guy, same vest,” she said. “At one point it was sleeting sideways and he was still waving the ambulance through ahead of everybody. I cried in the parking garage about it, honestly.”
People brought him food and he turned it down for a day and a half. He kept refilling the thermos and saying he was fine.
That ended Saturday evening, when Yolanda Pressley-Quist walked out from her house on Third with a foil-wrapped plate, set it on the hood of his truck, and did not leave.
“I told him I would stand in that road myself if he didn’t eat,” Pressley-Quist said. “He looked at me for a while. Then he ate.”
One line, and nothing else
A Lakeshore 9 crew approached Cowen at the intersection Saturday afternoon. He declined to be interviewed.
Asked why he was out there, he said one thing.
“The hospital’s that way.”
Then he waved a delivery van through and turned his back to the camera. He has declined every request since, including two this week.
Cowen is a Port Alden software developer who released a widely used open-source scheduling tool in 2017, and he has lived on Ferris Street since 2016. Several neighbors who spoke to Lakeshore 9 about the Port Alden power outage said they were not surprised by any of this, and then declined to explain further, which is roughly how everyone on that street handles questions about Brandon Cowen.
City hall has not settled on what to do about any of it. A resolution recognizing the residents who worked the dark intersections is on the agenda for the March 8 council meeting, and Cowen’s name is on the draft.
Two councillors have already been told privately that he will not be there.
The Bellhaven substation is expected to be back at full capacity by the end of the month. The signal at Dunmore and Third has been running normally since 3:20 p.m. Sunday.
Lakeshore 9 reporter Delphine Okoro-Marsh contributed reporting from Dunmore Street. Have a storm tip? Reach the Lakeshore 9 newsroom through the station’s tip line.