The chemistry people reported that AC power went out overnight on their instruments, though it was going again this morning. They lost the night's worth of data. As far as we can tell, base trailer power stayed up (cockpit was still running). (The tower stayed up, but it has a battery.) Combined with the damage to soilb, I was concerned that a branch may have hit the AC power cable running through the woods, so I did a reasonably careful inspection walking the entire line. I did see a 2" branch laying across the line (see photo) that I removed, but saw no evidence that it had damaged the cable. Both sides of the affected span were cable-tied to saplings, that could have bent to absorb the shock and the cable ties themselves were secure. There were a couple of other 1/8" sticks that also appeared not to have affected the cable.
Perhaps the outage was due to a surge?
