I arrived at my mom’s house in Connecticut about 6pm on 10/29/2011, about an hour after the electricity went out. It had snowed roughly 4 inches by the time I got there, and we got that much again overnight. It was very wet, heavy snow, and that combined with the many trees still holding on to their leaves resulted in many trees and branches breaking and taking down power lines. (By the way, does anyone know what the people of the Northeast did to piss off Mother Nature? This freak early snowstorm comes two months after an extended power outage caused by Hurricane Irene.)
I wanted to take some time and write down a few of the things I learned or was reminded of during the outage. Most of what I learned and experienced could be applied to our civilization’s future of shortages.
Gasoline is a Big Deal, and not just for cars. In this kind of situation people also need it for chain saws, generators, and snow blowers. People will wait in line for as long as necessary to get gas, and although I didn’t see any signs of gouging, I believe people would pay just about anything for it if they don’t have it. We would be hard pressed to live our daily lives without our fossil fuel slaves.
The difficulty in getting gasoline limited my ability to run the generator to power the water pump and the furnace. Also, in combination with having only a quarter tank of gas in the car and the suburban location of my mom’s house, the gas shortage put an extreme limit on my mobility and ability to get stuff I needed. The other factor that limits your ability to get what you need is obvious: everyone else wants what you want at the same time you want it.
Another limit on getting basic supplies was many merchants’ reversion to using only cash for purchases. If all you had was credit cards or checks, you were out of luck.
My cell phone was invaluable during this crisis. The land line at the house stopped working the day after the storm and didn’t come back for several days. Voice conversations on my cell phone were not possible for most of the day on Sunday, the day after the storm, although I could still send and receive text. I’m thinking that was caused by overloaded cell phone networks, and was cured by Monday.
The other aspect of cell phone usage is that you have to recharge them every few days. My cell phone has good standby time and I never ran it completely out of power, but you find yourself carrying your charger with you wherever you go, and plugging in whenever you find a live outlet. The shelter they set up at the high school offered free charging stations for cell phones.
Anyway, without my cell phone I would have been completely cut off from the world outside my little neighborhood. Would that matter at all? I’m a news junkie, and I invest both time and energy in feeding that habit. I used to think that the term “junkie” was just kind of a cute name for someone who closely followed events in the outside world, but now I see that it’s more than that, and is an accurate way to describe a news addiction. For this purpose, a good definition of “junkie” might be: someone who engages in a useless, harmful, resource-consuming indulgence. What difference does it make how much I know about what’s going on in the world? I know I have to prep, and that’s really all I need to know. I will definitely know if there’s a crisis worth knowing about. So I’m thinking I have to cure that addiction, maybe go back to reading our local newspaper instead.
Also, I found a calmness and personal peacefulness living in a quiet, dark house with no TV, no radio, no computer. I only spent one night alone there, but it was very calming. Is it unreasonable to expect that of life in this world? Should my family and I move to rural Ontario and live off the land? I don’t know the answer to that, but I began to see and understand the negative consequences of the constantly-distracted state of mind in which many of us find ourselves, always jumping from thing to thing, never focusing on something for more than a few minutes. It becomes a way of life after a while, and you forget that it’s not normal or natural, but are left with only a vague feeling that something’s wrong. My job reinforces that distractedness and superficiality. At the least, for the sake of my mental health, I need to try to move myself in the opposite direction when I’m not at work.
I did talk to several of my neighbors during the power outage, which I almost certainly would not have done if there had been no outage. I can see that not having contact with the outside world would make neighbors not only more desirable but also much more important. For example, I was able to borrow a couple of gallons of gas from my neighbors to run my generator, which I would not have been able to do otherwise.
Appetite fatigue is real. My mom happened to have plenty of canned fish (sardines, salmon, and tuna), and had received a bag of fresh spinach and lettuce the day before the storm. A salad with canned fish is one of my favorites things to eat, but after a couple of days the idea of it was, if not revolting, at least distasteful.
I missed potable water out of a faucet more than I missed heat (but it wasn’t that cold).
There wasn’t any way to heat the house without electricity. I could have built a fire in fireplace, and if it had been cold enough I would have and been able to warm myself in front of it, but it would have made the rest of the house colder. If I owned that house, one of the first orders of business would be to install a woodstove or fireplace insert.
I melted snow to get water to flush the toilets. What would I have done if there had been no snow on the ground? There’s the brook, but it’s not very close and it’s down in a valley, making getting water without a car very difficult. (There was a hurricane roughly 45 years ago during which my father drove down the street to a bridge that crossed the brook and filled up trashcans with water to flush the toilets.) A yoke for carrying 2 5-gallon buckets, like I’ve imagined before, could be used by a strong person.
My mom and her household were unprepared for a power outage, even after the 6-day power outage caused by Irene two months ago and snow-caused power outages last Winter. Yes, she’s old and it’s not her fault. I should have taken it upon myself to prepare her. Here’s a list of survival resources present or not present at the house before I arrived on Saturday, which could be used to start a list of items to have on hand to weather any crisis that interrupts basic services:
↓ Potable Water: 152 oz (128 oz of which just happened to be delivered with groceries the day before the storm)
↓ Water to flush the toilets: 0 oz
↑ Generators in working condition, which could power both the furnace and water pump: 1
↓ Gasoline to run the generator: 0 oz
↓ Know-how and ability to run the generator: 0
↓ Gasoline in the car: 1/4 tank
↓ Flashlights: 1 2-battery c-cell, 1 3-battery d-cell
↓ Batteries for flashlight: 6 c-cells and 0 d-cells
↓ Battery-powered radio: 0
↑ Kerosene Lamps: 6
↑ Kerosene for the lamps: 28 oz
↑ Candles: 6 half-burnt, 4 full-size, plus 8 not-very-useful votive candles
↑ Candle holders with chimneys: 2
↑ Candle holders: 8
↑ Matches: Two mostly-full boxes of 250 kitchen matches
↓ White-gas-burning camp stove: 0
↑ White gas for camp stove: 1.75 gallons
↓ Know-how and ability to run the camp stove: 0
↑ Outdoor grill: 1
↓ Charcoal to burn in the outdoor grill: 0
↑ Food on hand was not too bad, and probably could have been stretched to last 10 days for three people if you had a way to cook it, 5 days without cooking.
↑ Extra blankets: lots
And now, I return to my life. I’m very glad that I took the time to write this, as I would have forgotten most of it by tomorrow if I hadn’t. (It’s only committed to electronic media now…need to print this out.)
Ending and Beginning 