Did you check the whole handbook or just that section? Ours buries it deep too, and the spot they picked is basically a loading zone.

Why would a power company even bother lying about something they know people can check with their own clocks? Duke has thousands of meters and an outage map that updates on its own, so a 45 minute number is probably just when the system logged the event, not when your lights actually came back. Maybe the map counts from when the crew got the order, not from when your block went dark. And a notebook of flickers is not exactly a stopwatch, so your start time could be off by a bit too. People love a cover up story but the boring answer is usually that the clock on their end and the clock on yours just do not line up.

Reminds me of a job I did near Bakersfield years back, we got caught in a freak storm while pouring a driveway. We only had half the concrete down and the truck was already backed up to the forms. Boss told us to keep going and we ended up with a surface that looked like a golf course. Client was not happy but it passed inspection so whatever. The whole thing cost us a weekend of grinding and patching. Weather apps are worthless out here in the valley, the radar just does not pick up those quick pop up cells. You made the right call covering it because fighting wet concrete never works out how you want.