I’ll live off the fat of my hips the land for several days.
I think our power is held together by bubble gum and duct tape. Several years ago during a bad storm I saw out the window an enormous blue light glowing. I think the transformer blew. Since then if the wind blows too hard the power goes out. I swear it just gets a patch to get the power restored and not truly repaired. Yet my streets are repaved so often if I were a kid I’d be out in my roller skates on the smooth surface.
D17 just heard this last week about Y2k and the survivalists and stockpiling. she had no idea and thought it was funny.
It was funny then too. My parents happened to watch a small feature on PBS about a pastor in my town who was urging his congregation to stock pile in case the computers imploded. The actual show was rather derisive of the guy but my folks only picked up the end of the world angle. So why not buy an $800 generator? You know…just in case.
We had a freak snowstorm in early October a few years before we moved and my street was without power for two weeks. The power company never did anything but patch and for years after we were constantly losing power. One time, after another outage for no apparent reason, I complained to customer service and she said. "You’ve only lost power 13 times this year, " like that wasn’t much.Finally, after a big ice storm a few years ago they did a major overhaul of the lines behind our house and haven’t had a problem since - even during Irene and Sandy. I live on one of the smallest loops and if we go out we are one of the last restored because so few customers are affected. We’ve considered getting a generator and we might still - but I only want the kind that comes on automatically and don’t know if it’s worth spending the money on it now.
We have a big freezer in the garage. We’ll eat like kings for about a week, then go into survival mode for another month or so. We have plenty of camping gear, an RV in the back yard that stays with 30 gallons of gas and has a generator. There is a small creek just down the hill to flush toilets and we have backpacking filters. And about a cord of wood, and axes and a chainsaw. We lost power for 6 days from a big windstorm and kind of enjoyed it.
If the big earthquake hits, all bets are off. I’ll probably be dead under my broken house.
Storm Sandy/Katrina seem to me to be about the “worst” you can get in modern America. They are impressively bad in my view and I thank heavens that we don’t get bad weather other than a few monsoons every summer.
Go see “The Martian”, save your poop, and you’ll all be fine.