For Canadian crews helping with power outage, sweaty glimpses of Washington life Instead, Coyle, a manager at Toronto's Hydro One utility company found himself mobilizing crews to bolt south to the Washington suburbs to repair power lines downed in last Friday's powerful storm. Some 200 workers formed a convoy of more than 80 trucks, many with Canadian flags flying, and drove 12 hours to Virginia. There was a two-hour delay while waiting for clearance at the U.S. border in Buffalo, N.Y. (immigration agents brought out coffee and donuts to help pass the time). Once here, they became part of a brigade of 1,950 out-of-state workers assisting 3,500 employees from Dominion Power in a massive operation to restore electricity to hundreds of thousands across the state. The Hydro One trucks were cleared to get onto the Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall, where the fleet parks overnight. The workers ate in a giant tent on base the night they arrived. At 9:30 or 10 p.m. buses took them to the Gaylord National hotel in Maryland to sleep. At 5:30 a.m. each morning, the buses return to bring the workers back to the base, where their trucks and a big breakfast of bacon, eggs, sausages, muffins, and lots and lots of ice water await them. They grab box lunches and their assignments for the day. On Thursday afternoon, 11 men were working in Arlington, where a massive tree had crashed to the ground, taking two utility poles with it. The tree trunk measured six feet across. While families sat watching them work, bringing out plates of cookies from time to time, the workers installed a new pole next to the splintered one and then scaled it to fix the wiring. When they climbed down and pulled off their hard hats, slick with sweat and exhausted from the sun, they still had a couple of hours of work ahead before the power could be turned back on. "It's different here" than in Canada, Coyle said. Hotter, more humid. More traffic, more roads. Everything's bigger. More people. Even the equipment in the United States is different: they workers had to learn how to use the machine that helped them install the new pole, said Jesse Ellis, a 24-year-old Hydro One worker. "We need to get some of those," Coyle said. This is what they see of Washington, D.C.: Tree trunks, small patches of welcome shade. People sweating on their back porches. Traffic, the army base, their hotel rooms. "I'd love to see the White House when we're this close," Ellis said. A drive-by, even. Maybe we can con our bus driver into going," on the way from base to hotel. Coyle did catch some fireworks. On his tired way home on July 4th, he was shocked to see the bottlenecked traffic along the Potomac River, and the parked cars, people sitting in lawn chairs right on the highway waiting for the show. Just as they pulled into the hotel complex, he saw a tiny fragment of how the United States celebrates its independence: A glimpse of rockets exploding, coloring the night sky.