Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.
What’s done is done, so, for me, no more reason to be hungover about the election. Accept the situation for what it is, and plan accordingly to mitigate it’s effects.
The NY region continues to try to get past hurricane Sandy. You have to understand that the parts of NY that youre reading about are actually a very small part of NY. Some parts of NYC never lost power or suffered much damage at all….it’s a rather large area, after all. It’s like thinking because of an earthquake in San Francisco all of California must be smoldering rubble. (Albeit, that’s a pleasant thought.)
The lessons and ‘teachable moments’ coming out of there don’t really seem to be things that we haven’t heard before, although once in a while a new twist comes in that I hadn’t thought of (like the rental car thing). It sounds like people were in three groups: those with no generators, those with generators, and those with generators and the logistics to support those generators. Looks like too many people bought generators and patted themselves on the back for a job well done and then gave no thought to where the fuel was coming from once the tank got empty. If there’s any lesson there it’s that you need to have all the logistics support (gas, oil, filters, fuses, cables, cords, documentation, experience, chain-and-padlock, etc.) or your generator is just a disposable eight hour UPS.
Speaking of generators, it’s always a good idea to run them once a month or so to make sure everything is doing what it’s supposed to. My brother very cleverly cut a length of PVC pipe, capped one end, put a screw cap on the other, hose-clamped it to the frame of his generator and it holds all the documentation, instructions and small parts for his genny. That way it’s always there and protected from pretty much everything.
The tales of looting and that sort of thing are no surprise and the solutions are rather simple for those who aren’t prohibited by local government from having the necessary gear.
One thing that’s interesting is that many people were completely unprepared to cook or heat their houses. Many homes still had natural gas pressure but did not have electricity to run blowers and ovens (assuming their stoves were gas, which many are not.) And while gas pressure may have been unaffected in some places, water was unavailable in many. I had a buddy whose gas hot water heater was doing great except with no water flow it was fairly useless…no hot showers.
Of course, there’s no guarantee that next time an event like this (or any other disaster) takes place that things will go the same way and there’ll be natural gas available. Personally, I’d love to have a natural gas generator for my house but I can’t rely on a fuel supply that can be interrupted. Propane would be my next choice but as someone pointed out to me, when comparing the merits of a liquid fuel generator versus a propane generator, when youre out of fuel you cant just go a few doors down to your neighbor with a five gallon bucket and borrow a bucket full of propane. On the other hand, a 500 gallon tank of propane would probably last a looooong time on a generator thats only run for a few hours a day.
A multi-fuel generator sounds nice but it also sounds like a lot more to go wrong. And my experience has been ‘one-size-fits-all’ solutions never wind up solving anything 100% of the way. What’ll probably happen is that we’ll wind up getting one of the Honda EU-series of portable generators at some point in the coming year. A buddy of mine got a nice feal on one offa Craigslist so perhaps I’ll troll around there for a while.
If you live in the east coast region, expect to see the local Craigslist flodded (get it? ‘flooded’?) with used generators as short-sighted people think “Wow, glad thats over!” and sell of their new gennys.
), put ‘em away someplace safe and save yourself the trouble of being like the folks in this photo.