Interestingly, there are still large parts of town without power. Normally power is very seldom disrupted for more than 24 hours. I’m reading that a major substation took some severe damage and that may be the contributing factor.
Me? I’m happy as clam. Power never went out in my neighborhood and even if it did I have the brains to have planned ahead. I’m reading the local Reddit threads and am unsurprised at the amount of absolute dumbasses who say that they fully expected Northwest Energy (NWE) to drop the ball on this situation but, despite expecting this sort of thing, had no plans in place to mitigate it.
I know this is familiar country to you and I, but here’s some observations:
If you have any empty space in your freezer, it should always be filled with water bottles. I see people talking about how they need to buy bags of ice to keep in their powerless freezers and while that works, as that ice melts your freezer turns into a swamp of thawing food and ice water. Bottles are easy, self-contained, and you can drink them when they are no longer frozen. It’s the best way to store extra water and increase the thermal mass of your freezer at the same time. And, in non-crisis times, they are cheap cheap cheap. I just picked up a couple flats of water bottles at CostCo last week and distributed them through my freezers.
My boss couldn’t’ get to work because she couldn’t get her electric garage door open. Those of us with a y-chromosome know the solution to this, but for the rest of you – that little T-handle hanging on a rope from your garage track will disengage things allowing you to manually pull your door up/down.
Anytime it looks like there might be a loss of power, start charging your devices. Or do this. Or charge from your car. Or have a USB charger that runs on AA batteries.
Have cash. ATM’s arent gonna work and you don’t want to be driving around town any more than you have to.
I have a few people in my office who are very screwed…no water, no electric…unable to shower, cook food, have air conditioning, do laundry, etc, etc. You have an alternate method, right? It may be an unpleasant alternative…taking a shower with a garden sprayer, for example…but its better than nothing at all.
Will people learn anything from this? No. Invariably, they’ll tell their ‘war stories’ about how the suffered mightily and when I politely ask them if they’ll be buying generators or doing anything else to mitigate a repeat performance of the event they will say “Oh no, this sort of thing almost never happens”. Even though it just freakin’ happened.
And that, mi amigos y amigas, is why, collectively, we are doomed. People like you and I are outnumbered by orders of magnitude by these idiots. But they have the numbers and the collective gene pool of humanity will suffer because of it.
Found a couple days without grid was not unpleasant but warm temps and flowing water made all the difference. Do need a small genny for cold applications or a test of kero heater to check if it is a viable alternative.
We’ll only have to suffer them as long as their caloric needs don’t outstrip their caloric provisions, or the ability and inclination of government to provide them a helpful teat to suckle.
Otherwise, the mean IQ grows higher by the day starting between about Day 5 and Day 20 of any problem, and only goes upward from there.
In six to ten weeks there will be a lot of second hand almost never used, if at all, generators for sale. People will go out and buy them then think it’s over and sell them. I once read a blog by someone in FL and over four years he got three from the same seller.
How many of your work “friends” have your address?
I had a secretary say once that “if anything ever happened” she was coming to my house. I said that was fine I would need lots of slave labor to keep the place running. The silence was deafening
when my sister said that I just looked at her and said ‘…you weren’t invited…’
“I had a secretary say once that “if anything ever happened” she was coming to my house.”
And the reply should have been. “Hmm. 120 lbs of protein. Delivered.”
Keep any preps private because the unprepared masses will demand that the force of government be used to take your stuff… for the children of course.
In my suburban neighborhood for some reason we and about 115 of my neighbors would frequently ( well 2-3 times a year anyway) lose power in a fairly hefty storm. Always it was a tree coming down on a power line. Something’s only last 12 hours but 3 times it lasted 24-48 hours. Of course I had a genset which ran my essentials. But it was only a 2800;watt bugger. Then latched onto a trifuel 9500 watt big set and of course haven’t had to use it since. But better to have and not need than to need and not have, right?
A chunk of my town here in MN lost power 5 hrs (and counting).. ago. After 3 hours I hauled out the smaller gen (2kw from Sam’s). It currently running the frig, 2 fans on low and charging devices. More then low on fans and it gets twitchy.
This is our longest outage in the 20 years I’ve lived here so can’t complain.
Steelheart
CZ’s comment on the red T handle on the garage door is correct. And those in the know should pull it once in a while and lift the door manually. It can be surprisingly heavy. A lot of them use a spring arrangement to offset the weight, and it goes out of adjustment (spring set fatigue?) so the motor does all the heavy lifting. You’ll never know until you pull the handle and try. Better to know now and fix it before a crisis.
As a retired lineman/troubleman for the power company I can tell you that there are a LOT of people who depend on the garage door as their only way to get in and out of their house. They would often come to me when we were working an outage and try to make their problem my problem. I would ask them why they didn’t have a key for the door of the HOUSE THEY LIVE IN then make fun of them for being so dumb. Good times.
You don’t get many guarantees in life but one of them is the power is going to be off sooner or later. Have a plan.
Mine has gone out twice and you will know!!! Hopefully the door is not up with a car in the garage when the spring goes.
I have a huge problem with buying bottled water. We use gallon milk jugs (filling them in the sink and keeping them topped off for 3-4 hours to remove milk from the top), and plastic soda/juice bottles (dishwasher).
Our thawed RO water tastes a lot better than the Ozarka garden hose water.