Thursday night at 5:30PM we had just finished dinner and I was in our basement family room looking for something to watch on TV when the lights went out. Preparedness Tip #1: while in survival situations, the first things you consider are water and shelter, when the power goes out, the first thing you think about is light.
With no light, I had to stumble across the family room to the stairs, walking into to the TV cabinet once, but luckily not stepping on the dog (he hates when that happens). I made it up the stairs where my wife had already found the flashlights, and since it appeared the power would be out a while - 3 hours is about average for an outage here - we proceeded to locate, candles, kerosene lamps and our Coleman lantern.
While it might seem obvious, light really is the most important first consideration - you can't do much else without it. Flashlights won't last as long as we eventually needed without lots of extra batteries. With a flashlight, I went around shutting down computers (we run a home-based business), and then settled in to wait for the lights to come back on.
This outage wasn't caused by wind - we were in the middle of a snowstorm that eventually dumped about a foot of wet snow. At 7PM, the lights came back on. I started firing up our servers, but the internet connection was dead. I went out with a flashlight, cleaned the snow off the satellite dish, and as I came back in the door about 7:10PM, the power went out again.
We called the county utility (PUD) and they had an estimate of 8:30PM for power restoration, which they beat by a few minutes. Back to restoring computer operations.
Preparedness Tip #2: Put all of your electronic devices on outlet strips and turn off or unplug the outlet strips when the lights go out. Many newer electronic devices either can't be switched off when they lose power (so when power comes back on, they automatically turn on), or you can't tell from the pushbutton switch whether they're on or off. When the power finally came back on, either the surge in voltage or the stuttering (on, then off and back on a few times before finally staying on) took out my wife's LCD monitor. That's not the first time something like that has happened to us (this time it was because the monitor was plugged in to the wrong outlet on the uninterruptible power supply).
After screwing around trying to get a spare monitor to work, I finally had to sacrifice my LCD monitor for my wife's system, not having another working spare. After that, and reading dKos a little, I went to bed.
At 4AM on Friday, my wife woke me up to tell me the power had gone out again. This time it was blowing gale force outside. In fact the power had been out a few hours. Back to the routine of shutting down systems (they're all on battery backup, good for about 2-3 hours), and then back to bed. I got up about 7AM, and checking with the utility, found out the estimated time for restoring power was 5PM.
Preparedness Tip #3: Decisions - after 8-10 hours without power, most houses are going to get cold - it was in the 20s here on Friday with a forecast high of around 30F. It's probably worthwhile considering whether you should go someplace warm. For many people, someplace warm equals work - we work out of our house (and therefore were shutdown by the power outage). We couldn't leave anyway - the aforementioned foot of snow, plus (we found out later) a number of trees down across the county road that's the only way out - anyway, I would have thrown a chainsaw and logging chain in the car for just that eventuality, had I tried to get out.
Preparedness Tip #4: Heat - if you have gas, oil or electric heat, you have no heat when the power goes out. 15 hours (our 2AM to 5PM) probably isn't long enough to worry, unless it's below 0F, but eventually in an unheated house, the water pipes will freeze. If you can shut off the water before you leave, it will save a mess.
We have a woodstove and designed our house so that the water pipes aren't in an outside wall and outside the insulation (based on past experience). So heat wasn't a problem for us, and neither, really was the snow. I have a tractor-mounted 60 inch wide snowblower, and spent about 7 hours on Friday clearing our driveway and half-mile of private road and the driveways of 3 neighbors. Normally, another neighbor with a snowblower would do about half of that, but his blower won't handle wet snow.
Preparedness Tip #5: Food - We had burgers for lunch on Friday, cooked on our gas grill on the porch outside. We also have a Coleman stove, and can cook on top of the woodstove too. Most people probably won't run out of food in 15 hours.
My wife had to leave for town around 3PM - it was her night to work at the local Teen Center. My daughter came home from college for Christmas around 4PM. At 5:30PM, the power still wasn't on as predicted, so I called the utility again - the new estimate was ... Saturday afternoon. My daughter and I had steaks and fries - cooked on the gas grill again.
Preparedness Tip #6: Communication - I called my wife in town and let her know about the new estimated time for restoring power. That and all those calls to the utility were possible because telephone service usually isn't interrupted by a power outage - the phone companies provide their own power, and more of their lines are underground. However, by 5PM Friday we were down to one working telephone. We have 2 4-line phones, 3 or 4 cordless 2-line phones, and one 2-line phone on the kitchen wall. Only the latter still worked, because all of the other phones require AC power to operate, even with battery backup. It's probably a good idea to have a phone that will work without AC power, or a cell phone. Cell phone reception doesn't exist anywhere up our canyon.
When my wife got the new estimate, we discussed Preparedness Tip #7: water. Water turned out to be our biggest preparedness problem. Over a 15 hour period, the only real problem with water at our house was toilet flushing - we have a well, and the pressure tank holds enough water (even with the pump disabled) to carry us through the better part of a day (if you have "city water", water, like telephone, probably won't be interrupted). We used to keep more water on hand, but we were down to 3 gallons of potable water, and another 6 gallons of water that wasn't stored to be drinkable.
You need water to drink, cook, wash dishes, for hygiene and to flush. So my wife picked up another 6 gallons of water ($1/gallon) at Safeway. We did melt some snow, and could have relied on that, but it takes a lot of snow (and heat) to make a usable amount of water.
So Saturday, we puttered around the house, did some more cleanup from the snowstorm, filled the wood rack next to the house from the woodshed. My daughter convinced us we wanted pizza for dinner, so my wife went to town to get that, and picked up a little extra kerosene and a chimney for a kerosene lamp we had. She got the last gallon of kerosene at the hardware store, and they were out of Coleman fuel (our Coleman lantern and stove are dual fuel - they can use gasoline too, and we always have that on hand for the tractor).
Around 5:30PM the power still wasn't on as estimated, so we called the utility again. The new estimate was ... Tuesday Afternoon. Another quick trip to town with 8 gallon jugs (you can fill them at Safeway for 41 cents each) and bought another 10 gallons of water. But now we have another problem - we run a business that needs phone, fax, email and internet, and is otherwise fairly computer intensive (we don't keep all of those computers running for fun).
We decided to call a friend in town and see if we could set up for business at her house - town still had power. As an aside, town lost power during the snowstorm - except our friend. For some reason she was the only house in her neighborhood that didn't lose power. People started calling her and asking if they could come over - were they cold or stuck in the dark? Nope - they just couldn't watch TV.
Our friend was fine with our invasion, and she even has high-speed internet. In the middle of the night on Saturday, my wife wakes me up: Alison doesn't have a phone! She has a cell phone, but no land line. After some rude grunts, I suggested we talk about it in the morning.
In the morning, we decide to move some of our computer stuff to our friend's house anyway, and get a cheap T-Mobile cell-phone for our use - at $100 or so it's a bargain, since we have several large orders pending. Then another friend calls just to talk, and suggests renting a generator - something we hadn't considered. Fortunately, the local rental place is open on Sunday mornings, so I zip into town and pick up a 3700 watt generator ($45/day), which will run our computers and phones (it would run our pump and freezer too, but that requires advance planning and preparation, which we hadn't done). Preparedness Tip #8: If you own a business, have an emergency plan and test it, or buy business interruption insurance.
Coming back from town, about halfway up the county road to our house, the road is blocked by a PUD truck. I stop and talk to the lineman - he worked 40 hours straight, got 7 hours to sleep, and now has been on the job 24 hours straight, but other than being tired, doesn't mind it too much - "It's like being an accountant at tax time" he says. He estimates we'll have power around 2PM.
So the generator stays in the back of the truck. My wife and daughter come back from town after showering, checking email on a friend's computer, and filling water jugs. We have lunch (soup cooked on the woodstove, and leftover pizza reheated there too).
2:30PM comes, and the lights are still out. We drag the generator out of the truck, fire it up and I run extension cords to the computers in the basement. The UPS that all the computers plug into doesn't like the generator. I come upstairs to see how my wife's doing and she says, "What'd you do? The lights in here work."
They work because the power has been on for the last 45 minutes, judging from the fact that we have plenty of hot water (but no water pressure - I have to restart the pump manually). Last Preparedness Tip: Leave a light on. Because the power died in the middle of the night, none of the lights were on. Even though we were continually flipping switches when walking into dark rooms, we apparently flipped them back off when no lights came on, so when the power finally did come on, we didn't notice.
So all in all, we survived pretty painlessly. Our two biggest mistakes were not having enough water on hand and not having a business continuation plan for long power outages - we have one for forest fires, but it turns out that one wasn't too good either, since it relied on the same friend who no longer has telephone (but we have other friends - they're just a longer drive away).
Should you think about this kind of thing? We live in a fairly remote area, but sections of cities were dark too. With some climate scientists predicting increases in severe weather, plus the age and condition of much of the electricity infrastructure (as in east coast and midwest blackouts), a snowstorm, ice storm, wind storm, hurricane, tornado or other severe weather or just the next blackout could put you in the same spot.
