Could you handle it? 12 days/nights w/out electricity

T

theedge13

Joined
Feb 11, 2008
Messages
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In our age of modern convenience, we take things for granted. Namely, electricity. I'm not talking about, lets go camping and be w/out electricity. Im talking about being without electricity as a crisis, not an inconvenience. The latest installment of Mother Nature's Fury, was unleashed upon much of Oklahoma recently. We are experiencing one of the worst winters i have ever seen (33 yrs old). More snow and such is predicted for later in the week...with that usually comes ICE, vehicle accidents, power outages, etc. Are you ready my fellow Okies (and everyone else that is getting killed this winter)? My grandmother wasnt. She is an 80 yr old widow, that depends on electricity, for her life (she is on O2). She just today got her electricity back on after 12 days and nights without. My parents live w/ her at the moment to tend her (their own home is 3 houses down), and even after the Christmas Eve crisis, they didnt get her fireplaced cleaned out (not that that would have actually helped the o2 situation, but would help them w/ warmth). Luckily, she was able to go to a nursing home and be cared for. My parents stayed at my moms business as it had Gas heat...taking showers at my aunts house once electricity was restored there. Long story short. Being prepared is a lifesaver. Mojos/smoke for any and everyone experiencing hardship in this aweful winter.

Chad
theedge13
 
a few yrs back we had a similar storm but ice
most of kansas city was without power for quite awhile
personally i had none for two weeks
the fortunate thing was it never got very far below freezing
i would come home at night
put on lots of warm clothes
get into bed with lots of blankets
the dogs n cats all piled on
read by lantern till i feel asleep
it wasnt fun but doable
once again if it had dropped into the teens or below
i dont know if i woulda been able to stay in the house all nite
i could have a hot shower and cook food since that is gas
drank lots of hot herbal tea at nite
even a few hot toddies......
and hot coffee in the am

of course we are the lucky ones
we can flip a switch and get power almost always
25% of the worlds population has no access to electric power
and even more only get it sporadically

but yes those of us who depend on it so much need some way to adapt even temporarily to life without electricity

my mother was also on oxygen the last cupla months of her life
hospice did suplly her with numerous o2 bottles that we only used when i took her in the car somewhere
they coulda been used in the house if the power was off
it was a limited supply tho
there were typically about 6-8 bottles in the house
but they were only good for about 3 hrs each
hopefully if such an occurence had arisen
that woulda given me enough time to get her more

yeah its been a long hard winter for many
high heating bills for those without work
several deaths among the homeless here around the holidays
when it never got above 10 or so for about 2 weeks
and some others deaths of those who had no heat in their homes
for varying reasons
 
I've been without electricity for 2 weeks before 2 or 3 times.

The hardest part was that my well that has a hand pump on it is approx 125 yards from my barn and it was really tough to go over there, pump enough water to water the animals and do all the other chores and not be late for work.

I have a dug well behind my house but it has an electric pump. I really need to put a hand pump on top of it, but now we also have public water so when the power goes off we still have water, except to the barn which is still on the dug well.

The other hard part is the food in the freezer. Lucky for us all but 1 time it was due to snow so we could either just put the freezer food outside, or turn our natural gas refrigerator in our cellar house all the way up and put it there.

The one time it happened in the warm weather I called a butcher who lived where the power was on and drove all my freezer contents over there.

In our house we have tonse of kerosene lamps headlights and other stuff so light is not problem. We have gas heat from a gas well on the farm so heat is no problem.

Another problem was twice a day milking. When you are milking twice a day you use a tremendous amount of water. While the power was off I just fed the milk to the chickens so all I had to wash out was just my little bucket and not jars milk filter etc.

Of course if we didn't have to work then we would have been able to hand pump enough water to wash the milking equiptment.

I found the hardest part was doing all the extra hauling and leg work and still driving an hour each way to work and working a full day.
 
Effortlessly.

Losing the computers for that long might cost me money but I'm certain there are workarounds to cap that to a minimum.

I'm optimistic because essentially I'm in a Paddy's Wigwam, a big brick basha that is waterproof and windproof. It's at a location of my choosing. It contains things that afford me comfort. It has a range of tools that would require a team of Sherpas to manhandle if they had to be made man portable. In a nutshell it would have all the things I might hanker for should I be trapped somewhere in the sticks in a survival situation save for that it wouldn't have electricity in it. Sounds like bliss to me.
 
LOL.Out of any " services"t for 31 daze, but had a genset and, 235 gallons of diesel. to run the whole operation./
This was a five time movie, The others were two to six daze.
Easily do-able.
 
I would be totally fine except for entertainment. As a substitute for the 'puter and television, I'd probably re-read a bunch of the books on my shelves. Unfortunately, I don't have any fresh books sitting around waiting for an emergency. I get curious and read them.

DancesWithKnives
 
Personally, I'd like that. For everyone else around here, it would be worse than Y2K.
 
I did a week+ w/out power. It sucked balls. Only moral boost was the woodstove. Plus it was in the middle of winter, and got dark uber early. Another bad thing was that all the food spoiled in the fridge/freezer.
 
I couple weeks without electricity wouldn't be too bad for me.

My camping trailer is parked right next to the house. It's small, but well insullated and supplied. It's actually rated as a four season trailer, with insullated/heated holding tanks. The stove, refrigerator, water heater and heater run on propane. It has large black water and grey water tanks, with a shower and toilet/

I could move into the trailer and weather that long of outage in pretty cold weather.
 
I did quite a few years with no electricity. I was eight or nine before the rural electric got out as far as our ranch. Some people had wind chargers or Delco plants but most were to poor in those days. Most of the young farmers had just came home from WW ll, like my dad with a few bucks from the G.I. bill and a dream. We had a propane refrigerator and kerosene lamps and lanterns. Before that we just had a Ice Box and cut ice off of the lakes to stock the ice house which in the fall was also the smoke house.
 
I grew up in Tennessee Ridge Tenn. poor white trash we killed squirrels, possums, turtles, deer and fished for our food no power and well water with an outhouse.

A country boy can survive, now put me in this LA traffic or in the streets with all these people and laws that tell me to be docile, then I have a problem.
 
After my Dad died, my mother and I had a rough go at life at times. One winter we spent without any water (my mother learned why you get a new "heating tape" when the old one goes...). The next winter, not to be outdone, the protective cover over the exhaust on the oil burner rusted through in spring or summer, we didn't know it and rain water was down in the burner and gutted it with rust. Fired up the furnace in November and wouldn't work. Couldn't afford to fix it. Had a kerosene heater in the living room because that was the only safe place to have it. Had no water because we had to turn it off because even a heating tape couldn't save us then. Whore-baths and pooping in the deep freeze, not fun.

Went without electric for lack of money on a few occasions back in the 80s, too. Not fun.

I've also lived in a place where you had heat all right, whatever you chopped down or picking up coal along the 4-lane into The Pound. :D

Them was the days. I actually liked that. Didn't like carrying water much because you couldn't use the running water because of the sulphur content.

Electric is probably the easiest to go without. When there is ice in the toilet and whatnot, it sort of resets your tolerance-meter as to how much crap you can put up with. :D
 
12/07 ice storm killed our power for 9 days.
we showered at a friend's house, cooked on the gas stove, and used oil lamps for light.
wasn't fun, but we survived.
if it had been colder, we could have fired up the wood stove in the detached garage and slept out there.
 
Granted it would be a major inconvenience at this point in time, but I have lived without electricity more than once in my life. Some of those times as a kid and some as an adult. Because of lessons learned during those times I try to always have an alternative heat source and an alternative cooking source on hand. I have a Coleman stove, and a few bottles of propane on hand (I'm looking for a used dual fuel), and we have a kerosene heater and lamps, a bunch of candles, a couple of candle lanterns, and a few battery powered camping lights.

I learned that I could use the electric outlets at a local laundry to charge my phone and the batteries for my cordless tools while I washed my clothes, hell now that laundry even has Wi-Fi.

Doing without the electricity was pretty simple...it was the water that was the real work.
 
When I lived in south florida, hurricane andrew knocked out the power for a month or so. It sucked but I would have to say the two weeks immediately after the storm when there was no clean running water was far worse than the month without electricity.
 
In the woods 12 days/nights w/out electricity would be fine. At home I'd go nuts. Last winter after a particularly bad storm we lost electricity for three days. I've never been so bored in my life. By the time we got power back I was practically climbing the walls. If I had a house with a yard to venture out to it might have been different, but in my 1000 sq. ft. apartment it just felt like torture.
 
I think around 7 or 8 years ago, we had the huge ice storm and we were with out power for 21 days, the temp. didn't get above freezing the whole time, I'm more prepared this time around.....It was an eye opener as to how people adapt to a situation or crisis.....Luckily most of our stuff in our house runs off gas, so the only things that we were without was electricity and tv......I could still cook, take a hot shower, it was actually quit nice...
 
In the early 90's We had a series of ice storms our power went out day after Christmas and we and power a total of 9 days from then till feb1. Hollowdweller could most likely narrow the date down as I lived in his neck of the woods back then (Winfield). we had a hand pump on the well, gas cook stove, wood and kerosene heat. coleman and kerosene lanterns
I would fill tubs on the wood stove with snow and have hot water for baths in the evening I rather enjoyed it. It is really amazing how much noise electric stuff makes in a house,
Roy
 
We did it for seven days last year after an Ice/snow storm. The temperatures were down at least in the teens if I recall correctly, maybe lower. The key was having our own heat source to prevent the pipes from freezing. We don't have a wood stove that's actually installed (I'm a procrastinator), but we did have two kerosene heaters and plenty of fuel. We also ran oil lanterns and candles for light which helped heat a little also and of course used plenty of LED lights.

Another big thing to plan for is what would you do if you had no power and no water. Make sure you store a few gallons of water per person per day. Enough for a week or two minimum and also have a few methods of collection, filtration and purification.

We heated water on the kerosene heaters, cooked on the gas grill, fire pit and camp stove. Kept our chilled food cold by leaving it all out in the snow.
 
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