We were without power from Friday, June 29 about 11 PM to Wednesday, July 4 about 4 PM - that’s 4 days and 17 hours or 113 hours. This posting is a first installment about the experience.
This is the longest time I’ve ever been without electricity at home and the first time to have a prolonged outage when the temperature was getting above 90 degrees Farenheit every day. The first few days were quite difficult because the outage was widespread. On Saturday morning we bought ice at a grocery store that was running a small part of the store on generators and bringing out pallets of ice. The next morning they didn’t have ice so we went to another store that seemed to be fully operational but they must have been on generators since all the stores around them were without power. We settled into a rhythm to go out to buy ice every morning before 7:30 getting more frustrated with our situation every morning; by Wednesday we knew that we were in the last 10% to be restored. The refrigerator items went into ice chests on Saturday morning and the freezer items (minus ice cream which had to be trashed) went into ice chests on Sunday. We managed to save everything except 3 eggs that broke (out of a dozen), the tortillas that got waterlogged from ice melt, and the cherries that absorbed water and cracked/burst. I’m in the process of cooking all the meat. Yesterday I cooked a brisket in the crockpot, barbequed pork chops in a casserole dish in the oven, and a meat loaf. Today I have to do something with the chicken. The ice chests have dried out and I’ll put them away today.
There were some things I came to be grateful for:
- We have a finished basement. It never got above 78 degrees Farenheit although it was humid and the air was very still.
- We are on city water and never had a problem with water pressure. People with wells had quite a challenge.
- We have a gas hot water heater. It was so hot, cold showers would have been tolerable but it was nice to have the heat.
- The grocery stores made a valiant (and successful) effort to make ice available.
- I had a good supply of physical books to read.
I always go into some level of self-analysis during and after an abrupt change like this. How resilient was I? In some areas I did well: switching my reading to physical books rather than e-books, staying still and drinking more water and herbal tea in an attempt to stay cool, and doing what had to be done to preserve our food. My daily sleep/wake cycle was almost unchanged.
So - looking back to the outage days - the two things I can point to as ‘accomplishments’ are
- 9 books read (and 2 partials)
- Majority of food from refrigerator/freezer saved
