Lessons learned from my recent loss of public electric power

Lessons learned from my recent loss of public electric power

Well, I believed I had thought of everything, but when I lost public electric power twice recently, I learned a few things, too. Once the power was lost between 2030 and 2230 last Sunday night, and again was lost this morning between 0200 and 0315.  The weather outside is adverse, and really cold and well below freezing.

Quick Summary: I and the place survived just fine.

Now the lessons learned come from my “surpises”.

1)      Light for humans to use is a big deal during the night time.

2)      Now I knew when the public electricity went off, but not knowing when it might come back on was just disconcerting. Like would it be a short time or a very long time? I just did not know.                          

3)      The thought of water pipes freezing bothered me until I thought about it, and the priority lowered in my mind. Now most of us want our toilets to work, for example, but using a five gallon bucket if need be used as a toilet will suffice for public health reasons.

4)      Knowing how to adjust a chemically powered hurricane lamp is a big deal. I did it backwards one time, and the wick even dropped out until I could make amends. In other words, I didn’t know how to adjust the height of the wick, and hence the light in the room.

5)      When public electricity goes out, so does the Internet, which uses electricity. I already knew that, but was still surprised.

6)      My battery backups (using UPS’s (universal power supplies) were nice, but I did not know how to turn off the beeping noises for a while.

7)      My daughter (a freshman in college) is going backpacking, and she took some of my survival type gear, which surprised me somewhat in what she took and did not tell me. The biggest surprise was an LED flashlight, which I recovered from relatively quickly. Then it (the replacement) needed new batteries, and I recovered from that, too.

8)      I was already using two of my six wood stoves, but gathering the wood in the dark was more difficult than I imagined. I had not rehearsed that, too.

9)      Last, and food and water wise, I have plenty of MRE’s which I already know how to use and eat from my military time. But my water supply was limited to maybe 5 clean gallons, and I would have liked more. Now the yard is presently full of snow and ice and nearby running springs, and I have two ponds and home filters to draw against, but at the time I just was not as prepared as I thought I would. Ten to 15 gallons stockpiled inside the house might be a better number to start out with.

10)  Now there is never a good time for hard times to begin, so a little recording of what happened, and even doing some extra rehearsals, is probably what I am going to do, too.

11)   Entertainment is a big deal to me. Perhaps I need more books and less DVD movies compared to my inventory right now. I need to check on that, too. Now I have many of both, but it is ratio that I will review.