At around 12:15am Pacific time the power went out. I called the power company on my cell phone and after waiting 30 minutes got through to be told that about 4,000 people in my city, and about 14,000 in nearby Salem, OR. lost power.
I was told it would probably be out until 4:00am but it just came on a few minutes ago, so it lasted about an hour and a half.
My wife is on a respirator and has a backup batter to plug into which lasts about 8 hours, so I’m pretty sure she was safe, but I’m glad we didn’t have to go till about 4:00am or so.
When my wife first came home on the ventilator I called the power company and they said they didn’t have any such list, even though a worker at the hospital my wife came from told me that the power company should.
My wife’s vent has a built in battery that lasts an hour. We have an external backup battery that lasts eight hours. We also have a backup vent for another hour. But if the power were ever to be out for a long time our plan is to call for an ambulance to take her to a hospital or somewhere where they still have power. Thankfully it’s never come to that.
I imagine the majority of power outages aren’t located at the “last mile” of connection - they’re due to screwups/breakages at large transforming stations, etc. which would render large swaths of the grid offline. even in a problem localized to a street, they can’t exactly fix the medical people’s electricity any sooner than they can everyone elses, can they?
It’s only been over the past year that I’ve found that some people have never experienced a power outage in their lives. This is an amazing fact to me, as you could count on one at least once a year when I was growing up.
I think you are perhaps misunderstanding what I’m saying.
Let’s say the power company has an outage in five neighborhoods. Two of those neighborhoods have people on powered medical equipment in them. The repair crews will go about repairing the lines in a certain order, so that the patients’ power is restored as soon as possible. This might mean that two neighborhoods get their power on an hour or two before the other three.
I don’t mean that, magically, only the homes of the patients get turned on first. It’d include everyone else on their same supply line.
Nobody: Jeez, I would be thinking seriously about getting a generator for back up power. But they can be quite expensive.
There are also power converters that plug into an automobile aux port or cigarette lighter socket that can be used to power one or two 110 volt appliances. You have to keep the vehicle running so you would need to possibly keep spare gas on hand, but the converters aren’t very expensive and might get you through a power outage. We had one at the last place I worked and plugged it into the company pickup truck and plugged the other end into our phone system when the power went out.
We do get ice storms, wind storms, and such here in Oregon and you need a back up plan. If we ever get the coastal subduction zone earthquake they keep promising, the power company isn’t coming to the rescue for weeks.
I can’t admit to that, but they have been d–n rare in my 57 years of life in Edmonton and Ottawa, and none longer than a couple of hours. I guess I’ve been lucky.
We have quite frequent power outages. At least 4 hours every month or so. The longest since I have lived here was over Christmas in 2003…4 days!
We put all the food from the freezer in the back of my car (the 2WD that stays parked, and frozen, all winter).
We were most thankful to have gotten rid of the pellet stove and replaced it with a wood stove that fall. The stove/oven is propane. The BIG problem is no power = no water. (We really need to get a backup hand pump for the well). It takes ALOT of melted snow to flush a toilet. Although not so much that I want to hike across the yard to the outhouse and drop my drawers in freezing weather.
We have a small generator that can power the TV and a couple lights. It lives on the front porch since it gets used regularly.
I’ll consider it if and when I can get a job to afford it.
Yeah, I already have one.
For the last two or three years we’ve had about one power outage per year in my neighborhood, which is very low for us. For a long time, mostly in the Winter, we had constant power outages. They could last a few seconds or a few hours but they were frequent.
Who gets their power back and when has a lot of factors.
If something like a wind of ice storm takes out power in many different areas then what determines where the power company goes first is piority. Hospitals, police, gov buildings etc will be high on the list. Areas with little repairs or large areas that can be simply fixed High.
The power grid is just that a grid, with many ways to get the power to the same area. If switching can restore power then short outage.
It a transformer blows in a substation. The cause has to be determined. Then the power co may be able to switch the area over to a different branch. Or a spare transformer connected into the line.They aare alrready there in large substations. If it is a transformer in the neighborhood then a new transformer will have to be located delievered to the neighborhood. At the same time the why will have to be corrected.
so the amount of time that your power will be out all depends.
Live in Texas and thunderstorms knock power out fairly regularly; as a kid, when I was there, I thought frequent outages were normal, though they didn’t usually last long. It doesn’t happen where I am now much – but we did have a major outage on Christmas of 2009; at my house it was about sixteen hours, but other people were out for up to twenty-four.
I live in the mountains. In Idaho. Not far northern Idaho, but it got down to 0F that night. I’m still not sure how my pipes didn’t freeze, but I am most grateful to whoever built this house 60-ish years ago and did that right! But I’ve never been indoors and been so damn cold. One restaurant in town had a huge generator (the owner had been laughed at for buying it, until he needed it!) but I didn’t find out about that until after the whole thing was over. It turned out that the one line that supplies power up here (there’s suddenly talk of installing a second, duh!) had broken way out in the middle of the desert, far enough out that it took them hours to even find out where and what the problem was.
And I’d been reading a postapocalyptic-sort of book earlier that day. I had to talk myself down pretty hard for the first few minutes.
Quite an adventure. At least in July you aren’t going to freeze without power!
I live in suburban DC. Our power company is Pepco, which is currently under investigation by the state of Maryland for sucking so spectacularly. We had some thunderstorms over the summer and people were without power for a week or more, and about 75% of the traffic lights went dark. We just got 5" of snow on Wednesday and 200,000 people lost power; some still don’t have it back.
It has become a way of life to expect multiple 24+ hour outages each year. It doesn’t even have to be weather-related. We once lost power for 3 days for no reason, and we wound up watching the second half of the World Cup final in a bar this year because the power suddenly went out at halftime on a gorgeous day. I carry a flashlight around with me much of the time, just because. No idea what people with medical needs do around here; I guess they call 911 or bail to hotels.
Not if you do not need 220v, 110v can be purchased fairly cheaply, under $500. What is expensive is a generac generator that auto rolls on once a week to test, and automatically turns on and switches power systems from line to generator. Those are around $5K for the generator, another $1k for the labor, a cement pad, a fuel source, and a bit of rewiring on the house, about another $4k or so depending on material cost and how much rewiring needs to be done. The main advantage for the generac system is that everything in your house just carries on as if no power outage was happening. If you just buy the job oriented small generator you need to run a line to the respirator and essential equipment [I would suggest at least 1 light source, and a heating or cooling appliance] and you need to go out and turn it on, and keep it fueled. But, $500 is a hell of a lot easier than $10K. Unless you can convince the insurance company to spring for it as essential survival gear.
Pepco is seriously the worst power company you could ever think of. After the Snowpocalypse last year they kept saying that sure, they could bury the lines, but that’s expensive. Except how much could it possibly cost, amortized over all customers and several years? Every year practically every household in the county has to throw out a fridge worth of food at least two times a year, not to mention hotel costs. I can’t imagine what it would be like for someone who had medical issues like the OP’s wife – it’s tough enough to deal with making sure my kid gets fed and keeps warm.
This time around we were lucky enough to escape except for about a half-hour on Friday morning (a day and a half after the storm). But who knows – as chizzuk says, sometimes it just goes out for no reason at all.
Nobody, if you ever decide to relocate to the northeast, you will need a generator. The power went out last week and it “only” took 12 hours to restore it, not 2 days like last year, or 5 days like in December of 2008. It’s not at all unusual for power failure, even single day ones, to last more than 8 hours. Fortunately, propane generators rock given they’re less smelly and quiter than gas ones, and they’re not horribly expensive. Plus, now that they’re catching on, there are even more local refill stations operating in the winter too, not just during grilling season any more.
