Storm: 1, Mark & Tim: 0

[apparentparadox]

There was a major storm around these parts last night -- high winds, rain, etc.

We lost power just before 5AM and didn't get it back until about 5 hours later.

Here's a bit of the scorecard for what happened:

Emergency flashlights: We have several that plug into the wall so that they are always charged. Unfortunately, we left them in the "auto"

Comments

[stormecho]

Patrick sort of watches the flashlights. I'm not always sure where to find them, or if they'll work. We usually have batteries on hand, but have also found that even though they may never have been used, it doesn't mean they will work.
I don't think about the radio much, as I always have iPoded music playing somewhere. Our beach bag contains a small portable though.
We only have cell phones. I usually try and keep mine fully charged.
Always a case of water on hand (more from parties than anything else), and food to get by on, I guess. Gas oven.
Gas heat.
Tons of candles that we've received as gifts thru the ages.
I can almost always entertain myself.

When there was that big grid power outage a few years back, our house continued to have air conditioning due to our proximity of the Holland Tunnel. Must've been some emergency power somewhere to be stolen.

Truly though, I don't know that we are properly prepared for a real disaster.

[apparentparadox]

Mostly, you need to have one flashlight that you can find quickly. Then you can take your time to find the others. I really recommend the little pocket LED lights. You can keep that with you all the time. Heck, I was even at a square dance (of course in a large windowless location), and the power went out. I had my pocket LED light on me, so could help people find their way.

LED mini

[stormecho]

Last Xmas, I gave those as a gift to most of my staff at work, but didn't get myself one.

Re: LED mini

[apparentparadox]

D'oh!

Re: power outages

[apparentparadox]

This recent power outage really made me think about it. But, I think that if we had heat & a way to cook, then we could do without electricity for a couple of days. Still, I may keep my eye out on those to see if they go on sale . . .

[billeyler]

We have plenty of candles, flashlights, batteries, canned/bottled drinks, canned/non-perishable foods, and an emergency weather radio and the like...it's the storms where the roof comes off, the windows break, and trees come crashing down that worry me more than just the power going off. Hope you don't have to experience that!

But of course we wouldn't cope well at a subsistence level for more than a couple of weeks...who would?

[apparentparadox]

As long as you can take care of yourself for 72 hours, you're way ahead of most people.

Good point about the roof coming off. I don't think that we have any spare tarps around. Back in Palo Alto, I had a bunch of plastic sheeting to help replace windows or hunks of roof if need be to keep the weather out.

[cjsmith]

Radio: Storm wins. We have two crank radios, but I know no specific stations. (I never listen to radios normally.) Maybe Rob knows.
Phones: We do have a non-cordless.
Food/water: We have a camping stove. We even have big chunks of water in the back yard - plus purification methods.
Heat: A day or more and we'd be camping out in the room with the wood stove. (We can fuel it for about a week with what we've got hanging around.) Hot water, however, storm wins. We have tankless water heaters.
Light: I know where the candles, the Coleman lantern, and the regular flashlights are, and I can even boot up the Coleman in the dark.

It's hard to believe it's been more than five years since the last time we lost power for five days. It was getting chilly that time.

[apparentparadox]

Every time someone talks about dropping their land line & only using cell phones, I worry what will happen in some kind of emergency.

Yeah, the tankless water heater is good for some things, but doesn't work well without power. I know that ours says that it's a bad idea to let it try to run if the power is out, so we manually turned off the output pipe to ensure that we didn't accidentally open a hot water tap someplace & it try to come on.

[nosrednayduj]

We have an all-electric tractor which is kept charged, and has a DC->AC converter, so we can run a small amount of 110V equipment in a power outage for a while. Mostly we don't unless we really need to; just are careful about opening the fridge and freezer. We use it for lighting in the evening, and during one summer outage we actually ran an air conditioner so Jocelyn, who was being fussy, could sleep. We also have an all-electric car, but we haven't done anything about making its batteries useful for house power

[apparentparadox]

Great for you. It's interesting that the people who have replied to this are pretty well supplied. I wonder if that's an indicator of the people I have as friends, or just that the ones who aren't prepared aren't so eager to broadcast that to the world!

We also have a crank flashlight (which is great). I've never tried one of those shake-it lights, but they did always seem like a lot of work for not much benefit.