For many of us, the morning of Friday, December 11, dawned dark indeed. After a night of freezing rain, every twig and branch on every tree was heavy with ice, which was both eerily beautiful and spectacularly destructive. Top-heavy trees fell on power lines, leaving thousands of households in our region without electricity, and consequently, running water and heat. For the least lucky among us, the juice failure lasted nearly a week. Here are some things we learned from the storm. 1. In a power outage, cordless phones don’t work, so at least one telephone in every house should be the old-fashioned, hardwired kind that plugs into a jack. Even if you get a cell signal at your house, with no way to recharge the battery, it’s only a matter of hours before you are without a phone again. 2. Two items that must have a permanent place of honor right next to the hardwired phone—a flashlight and a card with the telephone number of your power provider, plus your account number printed in large figures. For NYSEG customers, this information entitles you to listen to a recording that is kept up-to-date. At first, it focusses on how widespread the problem is. If it had been just us and a few neighbors, we'd have counted on power being restored within hours. But since thousands of customers were affected in the recent storm, we knew to brace ourselves for a long haul. The recording was kept updated throughout the week with estimates of when our power would be restored. 3. Propane-fueled stove owners can skip this one, but should see the note* below. In the fireplace, you can scrape the burning embers forward into a pile, then straddle a metal rack between the fire dogs and cook over the embers—grill a steak, heat soup, or boil water. But it takes hours of feeding a fire to accumulate sufficient coals, which means, in a blackout, no morning coffee. If anyone reading this knows a solution to this desperate dilemma, please leave a comment below. 4. After your first culinary triumph in the fireplace, be prepared for the tedium of repeating the filthy, laborious process meal after meal—heavy deposits of soot on pots and no way to wash them, too-intense heat that cracks the coating on good enameled cast iron pots. A wood-burning stove also takes time to heat up, but it's a cleaner way to cook. 5. Even if your road is closed due to fallen trees and wires, unless a live wire is lying across your own driveway, it’s safe to start your car there and sit inside it to listen to radio news while you warm up. Once the roads have re-opened, you are free to drive in any direction in search of coffee. Take a large thermos along. 6. You also are free to repair to greener pastures, if you can swing it. But before bolting, be sure to protect the pipes. Simply open the valve that drains the pressure tank in the basement, attach a rubber hose to the outlet, and lead the water to your sump drain (if you don't have one, capture it in buckets). This drains the pipes but there is still water in the trap of each sink and in the toilets. To prevent damage from expanding frozen water, use anti-freeze (the kind designed for RVs is said to be best). Pour a couple of cups down each drain, enough to fill the trap. Then flush each toilet repeatedly, if necessary, to empty the reservoir, and pour anti-freeze into the bowl. Even if you stay at home, you must do this should the temperature indoors dip so low frozen pipes are a threat. 7. During the recent power outage, the heroic volunteers at our fire departments distributed free jugs of drinking water, as well as dry ice to help keep the contents of our fridges cold. For those unfamiliar with the ways of dry ice, anything near it will freeze or, if already frozen, remain so. So, if you only have one block, forget the distinction between the refrigerator and the freezer and rearrange all your cold foods so the most precious stuff from the freezer is nearest the dry ice. Be prepared to return to the fire department to beg for another block every couple of days. 8. If you know an ice storm is coming (and we had plenty of warning with this one), fill the bathtubs with water in case you need a ready supply to flush the toilets once the power goes out. Failing that, use creek water. Unless you are a fisherman, it’s unlikely you’ve paid much heed to access points to the streams and creeks that run through your neighborhood. So before another emergency arises, scope out a good level place on a nearby road where it's easy to park and fetch creek water by the pail-full. Make sure you have several buckets or one large preferably covered container (all that sloshing!) that fits in your car to transfer each bucket-full to. 9. None of the above is necessary, of course, if you’ve had the good sense and foresight to acquire a generator. Luckily, our sainted neighbors Richard and Debra Oliver called on Saturday morning offering showers and pancakes at their place, then lent us a gasoline-powered generator. All this, despite our previous relationship having consisted of nothing more than occasional smiles and waves. Rich is a general contractor so he had several portable generators at his office that he distributed throughout the neighborhood. Thanks to his largesse, thirty-six hours into the outage, we had heat, running water, a few lights, and two functioning computers. (The power was out for three more days.) We wouldn’t have dared challenge the generator by running the refrigerator or stove, but at least we could use our coffee maker, wash the dishes, and get some work done. 10. Portable, gasoline-fueled generators are noisy and spew deadly fumes, so Rich helped hook ours up down by the pool, far from the house. Like a lawn mower, a generator requires a strong arm to get started, and it must be shut down, refueled, then restarted several times daily, which means frequent trips to the gas station. In other words, while a blessing, it is no panacea. So, we've made a solemn oath to buy a propane-fueled generator of our own, the kind that kicks on automatically the moment a power outage occurs, whether we're at home or away. Rich has investigated these for his own property and is leaning toward the Guardian from Home Depot, which has models ranging from 8-circuits @$1989 (powerful enough to keep the bare essentials going) to 20 circuits @$5149—enough to run every luxury in a good-sized house. (All of the local hardware stores I called said they carry only the gasoline-fueled kind.) * A propane provider is more likely to show up promptly with a refill if you have a sticky relationship—he also provides your heating oil, say, and you have a service contract with him. At least one outfit in the region was charging a gouging $100 emergency delivery fee for propane refills, and another was taking its sweet time showing up for its propane-only customers. So even some of those with gas stoves found themselves hovering over sooty pots in the fireplace.
