Big Storm and a Power Outage

Posted on January 7, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized |

The power at our house went out at 11am on Friday, came back on Saturday afternoon. We experienced some torrential rain, as bad as anything I’ve seen in the last 10 years. For the duration we were stuck at home as it was too unsafe to drive and trees were down everywhere, plus with children it’s sometimes better to just stay at home.

PG&E catches a lot of crap, some of it well deserved, and there are still tens of thousands of people without power (friends in Marin were down for 3 days), but I have to say that their work crews answered the call and did the best they could with the conditions that were forced on them.

I woke up at 4am on Saturday just to check around the house and throw another log in our fireplace, which was the sole source of heat over the course of a very cold night, and I saw a PG&E crew working on a power pole down the hill from our house. The only light they had was a portable and the winds and rain were just terrible. On Saturday in the middle of thunder storms they were working on power poles, I’m sure it was because lightening was off in the distance but it wasn’t that far away.

You really suffer a harsh reminder about how dependent we are on electricity when you don’t have it for a prolonged period of time. I am pretty good about being prepared for emergencies, here’s a couple of things I would suggest:

1) Hand cranked LED portable lighting. These are great for kids, and of course, for adults too. No batteries to deal with, completely safe and because LEDs are miserly consumers of power, a 1 minute crank powers the light for 1 hour.

2) Cell phones with the mobile web meant we were using them quite a bit to get status updates. Radios are considered essential emergency equipment but from my experience, a cell phone is your true lifeline. Keeping it charged is a challenge, so make sure you have a car charger. Most newer cars have 12v outlets that are always on, we charged our cell phones and a portable DVD player from one.

3) Candles are essential but inherently unsafe in an emergency, especially around kids. These 100 hour emergency candles are pretty neat, they burn liquid parafin and have a simple collar around the tip that extinguishes the flame if the candle tips over.

4) Modern forced air heating systems simply don’t work without power, so have a backup. We always have a cord of wood stockpiled in the fall and we burned a good amount of it to keep one floor of our house warm in the absence of a heater. The burners on gas ranges/cooktops will also generate heat but it’s very localized. Simply light the burner with a match as the igniter won’t work without power.

Lastly, know your neighbors. We have an elderly couple that lives next to us, the pilot light on their water heater went out and they thought it was because of the power outage. I’d hate to think how long they would have been without it were it not for the fact that my wife checked in on them and I relit it after she told me about it. Online social networks are great but no substitute for real world networks we often overlook in our own neighborhood.

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