But, once again, I came through with flying colors recently when a dramatic blizzard hit our area and left many people without power for a week. The power went out in my neighborhood around 11:30 p.m. on Saturday night and didn’t come back on until Sunday afternoon.
It was an inconvenience, but that was about it, because I was pretty well prepared.
You see, in winter, I seal off the rooms in my house I don’t use so I don’t have to pay to heat them. This includes the room where my freezer and refrigerator are, so I had no problem with food thawing out or spoiling.
I generally use electric space heaters to warm my bedroom and living room, but I live in an older home that has a floor furnace, so I turned the heat up and was able to stay warm.
That floor furnace really came in handy.
The day the storm hit, while many people were loading up on bread and milk and other perishables, I was buying cold cuts and such for sandwiches and chips.
Most people don’t have a wood-burning stove and a lot of what they were buying didn’t make much sense to me. It’s hard to cook in a modern kitchen if you don’t have power.
I keep flashlights handy, including an induction flashlight. When the battery goes dead, you just shake it up and it charges. That’s a handy thing to have in a situation like that.
One thing that came immediately to mind dealing with life off the electric grid for a few days. It got you to thinking about your own ancestors and what their lives were like before power lines spread everywhere. I am old enough to remember oil lanterns and such as well as the old wood-burning stoves you could cook on in my great grandparents’ house over near Dingess.
What was a major crisis for us these days, was just day-to-day living in the winter for them.
Granted, I was wishing I had a battery-powered radio, so I could listen to music. I was also wishing I had bought that used gas generator somebody offered me back in the springtime!
I realize now why music was so important to the pioneers. Life is dull without it as background noise. Already being so prepared for a disaster, the eerie silence was the biggest challenge I faced without power.
As my water heater is gas-powered, I had plenty of hot water.
In the daytime, I sat and read a lot. At night I used candles by which to read. Candlelight gave “The Historian” an even eerier mood than I am guessing the author intended.
Even though I don’t have a specific winter survival plan for my home, my basic year round plans worked anyway.
As for travel, I do have plans for that. In the winter time, I travel as little as possible anyway. However, when the fall comes around and temperatures drop, I put a winter coat, blanket and food and drinks in my truck just in case I break down or am stranded someplace.
I have been doing this ever since an incident back in the 1990s, where I got snowed in at a coal mine for eight days. I learned the hard way that it pays to carry some food, drink and blankets for survival in the winter.
With a little foresight, you, too, can learn to deal with and adapt to these situations that sometimes arise in our day to day lives. Remember, some of the things you buy for emergencies can come in handy in other ways. It never hurt to have a little extra canned food (and a can opener), drinking water, candles and flashlights around in an area where we are prone to winter power outages and springtime flooding anyway.
It’s always better to think ahead and plan for these emergencies than it is to sit and wait for somebody to come and rescue you because you didn’t prepare properly.
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