The longest we’ve been without power is 4 days, but it was very localized – my brother-in-law who lives less than a mile away never lost power. I was fortuitously out of town, but husband managed quite well – we shared a generator with our neighbors and were able to keep the refrigerator and freezer going.
Because power outages used to be common in our area, some people have generators powered with natural gas, which is part of why I wondered what would happen to natural gas service.
If a longer-term outage happened here in the summer, I think we’d be okay for a while – particularly if natural gas continues to flow. We have a decent amount of canned goods. We have a gas range, so we could still use the stove. We have a gas fireplace so if the temperature did drop we could huddle down in front of the fire. We have a couple of rain barrels, so unless we hit a long dry spell we’d have water to flush the toilets.
I lived through the ice storm on 1998. Freezing rain started on a Monday afternoon in early January. By Tuesday morning, my power was out. I drove to my office where there was still power and I had a couch in my office along with a sleeping bag for my wife and we stayed there one night, then drove back home to get suitcases with some changes of clothes. Then took the commuter train back to my office. Waiting for the train, we found out from a neighbor that a couple in their mid 90s had died of CO poisoning, trying to start a fire in their basement. They had refused to go to the shelter the town (a near suburb of Montreal) that had set up cots in the town hall and had, I assume generators. Anyway, we spent a second night in my office. Then on Thursday, I called a friend who lived near enough to downtown that he still had power and we decided to go there to shower. While there, the chair of my dept. called to let us know not to return because they had lost power. Our friend had by that time collected his wife’s parents and another small family, but they still had a mattress on a floor that we could stay it. So we stayed there and I called home every day until the following Tuesday when the answering machine picked up so I knew we had power again. In the meantime, my friend and I went to my house and two others to drain the water. The temperature had stayed near freezing the whole time. The day we went home, there was a deep freeze. My friend had intermittent power interruptions, mostly last an hour or two and then it came back on. The water stopped for about an hour and a half and that left us seriously unhappy. The water company does have backup generators.
For us, it was not too bad, but I would have been extremely unhappy to spend a week in a house with a temperature gradually heading towards freezing. And while all of Montreal Island was back in 8 or 9 days, but some of the off-island places didn’t get power for a month or 6 weeks. Needless to say you couldn’t buy a generator after the first day. Some people came from places up north where they did have power with truckloads of firewood that they were giving away! I never heard any problems about food. It was all about keeping warm. A friend of mine had a gas furnace that had its own built in generator, just enough to power the ignition once you lit it with a match. The pumps didn’t work, but gravity flow was enough to keep his place habitable. What I had was a “dual energy” system, oil and electricity and even the oil could not operate without power.
I lived in North Carolina in 1989, when Hurricane Hugo hit. We were without power for at least a week, probably closer to two weeks. Since it was over 30 years ago, and I was 9 years old at the time, so my memory isn’t great, but here’s what I recall…
The first few days were pretty much a game of “use up as much as possible from the freezer before it spoils”. My parents cooked it out back on our charcoal grill and Coleman stove. I have a distinct memory of eating a frozen pizza that had been baked on the grill. Ironically grilling pizza is the trendy new thing now, but at the time I thought it was overly charred.
We were on well water, actually a single well for the entire subdivision, so running water ran out pretty quickly. We got buckets of water from the nearby creek to flush the toilets with. As I recall for drinking water we went over to a friend’s house which was on the city water supply and filled up some jerry cans. We went over there to shower once or twice, too.
I don’t recall heat being an issue. It was October in the South, so it probably wasn’t that cold yet. Nothing you couldn’t deal with with some extra blankets, anyway.
At some point my parent’s were able to borrow a generator from someone (I guess their power was restored sooner than ours or something), so we could at least power the fridge again.
Honestly, as a 9 year old kid my main annoyance was that I was bored because I couldn’t watch TV. I’m sure I’d remember it differently if I’d experienced it as an adult and actually had to deal with all those things myself.
I remember the Grand Forks flooding, and the huge fire that broke out at the newspaper headquarters and destroyed over 100 years of archives. They were, one way or another, able to replace most of it.
After the 2020 derecho, I lost my power for 3 days, and made do at home. My brother packed up his family and stayed at a hotel in a nearby town that had power; they felt that they were OK without power, but their neighborhood is on a water well, and that pump didn’t have any kind of battery backup. They had to boil their water for a day or two, but that was OK.
According to a Google search, municipal water towers are configured to hold about a day’s worth of water. For an outage longer than that, they’ll need electricity to pump new water up into them.
As to whether they have generators or not, the answer probably varies from place to place. a reliable clean water supply is so important that the EPA actually publishes a guide to help municipalities think about how to keep water flowing during disasters:
(PDF)
Even if they don’t have permanently installed backup generators, they can probably get them. A few years ago a major wind storm knocked out power to large parts of the Detroit metro area; I visited a local grocery store and found that they had rented a massive backup generator, and were still open for business.
Re: how long backup generators last, that depends on fuel supply. In disaster situations like this, the National Guard would likely step in to assure fuel gets supplied to critical systems like hospitals, water supplies, and communications. I suspect power to residences might be kept off so as to conserve generating capacity for those critical systems. So you’d have water and cell service at your house, but your freezer would thaw out. If you need electrical power for life-critical medical equipment, you’d need to go somewhere with power, e.g. an evacuation center set up for such purposes.
Most won’t. Typical private home wells are a few hundred feet deep, and they’re not set up for manual pumping. It’s not physically possible to suck water up that kind of height with a straw; instead, you have to get under it and push it up. This is typically done with an electrical pump that’s lowered to the bottom of the well. You can get hand-powered well pumps, but they have limited depth capacity. This one can lift water a couple hundred feet, but that listing is just for the hand-operated lever that you install at ground level. Note the red text indicating that additional parts are required, including the actual pumping cylinder that goes at that the bottom of the well and the actuating rod connecting that cylinder to your hand lever. This is not a simple installation, and if you don’t have one of these on your private well when the power goes out, you’re kind of screwed. Most folks on private wells rely on either a backup generator or a cache of bottled water to get them through most expected power outages.
Fluids don’t move themselves by magic. Municipal natural gas systems require compressors across the network to drive the gas through the piping, and the compressors therein require a power supply to do that. As it happens, the very gas they are pumping is an excellent supply of such power, so a lot of these compressor stations power themselves with natural gas. It’s not clear whether these stations are 100% self-sufficient in the event of an electrical outage.
Cell service is the only avenue of long-distance communication for some folks. According to this NYT article:
Most cell towers have some form of backup power. When they lose power, they resort to batteries. If the batteries run out, the towers draw power from generators, which rely on fuel. These methods can provide power for days or longer, depending on whether the generators can be refueled.
So, same as municipal water systems: as long as a steady supply of fuel is available for generators, the service can be maintained.
As for other services, it goes back to the availability of fuel for their electrical generators. If they’ve got electricity, water, and natural gas, they can probably keep things going until actual medical supplies start running low. Once that happens, we’d be tapping into the Strategic National Stockpile, though it’s not clear how long this stockpile would last in the event of an electrical outage that cripples production nationwide.
In the short term, looters are motivated by an easy prize, so historically, looting is more common in situations where homeowners and business owners are absent, e.g. during/after a hurricane. A very large-scale electrical outage such as you described in your OP would still probably leave most people at home, because where else are they going to go? This will give most looters pause, at least until a time when their need for life-sustaining items (e.g. food, water) overcomes their fear of armed conflict with the people whose homes they are trying to rob.
This is hard to answer. Even in the “large” outage in Texas last year was limited to just parts of Texas. People in those areas with the resources to get out could flee to other parts of the state, or other states, where hotels and restaurants and infrastructure were all functioning normally. For people in affected areas without the resources to get out, emergency services were still available. If local governments couldn’t provide help, then help from the likes of FEMA and the National Guard came in from outside those areas. Your hypothetical features an outage that affects “most or all of the US” and lasts for a long time, which is a much bigger problem than last year’s Texas outage. In terms of ability to cope, circumstances vary widely from household to household and town to town across the US. There’s also the question of how you define “total chaos.” If your supply of fresh water is interrupted and you don’t have much of a stockpile, you’re going to get thirsty pretty quickly. Once local stores sell out (or get looted), I think you’d be looking to the National Guard to fill your bottles from their tanker trucks. I think after a couple of weeks with no relief in sight, we might start to see a breakdown of civil society in some places as resources like food and water start to become scarce and people start using violence to take (or keep) what they need to survive.
I’m not sure if this is exactly the same thing that you’re talking about, but about ten years ago my area had a massive ice storm that knocked out electricity for almost everyone. My house was one of the last to have power restored, and I had no electricity for almost a week. Although I had no lights and the furnace didn’t work, my house also has a ventless gas heater in one room. It continued working throughout the power outage, and I was able to mostly keep warm using it.
Passive solar house and heat with a propane stove. So that would just be normal for us. We always have a few months of propane.
There is a small spring on our property for a water supply. I’d probably want to boil it for drinking though. Last thing you want in a situation like this is giardia or something.
Be ok on food for a week or two. I’m not a hunter, but have the means to do so. Depends on the time of year for game running around.
We have 4 oil lamps that put out lots of light. My Wife and I would just hunker down and play chess, cards or any other number of games which we do nearly every night anyway.
Not making lite of such a situation. I’m sure it would suck big time
We are on a well. When the electric goes out, we instantly lose water. We also lose heat; our furnace runs on propane (from a tank installed on our property), but electricity is needed to operate the blower fan.
So when the electric goes out, I simply hook our portable 3600 W generator to the house. Works like a charm. At that point, all we need is gasoline. As long as the gas stations have gas, we’re good.
A much cheaper alternative is to use a well bucket. Simply lower it down into the well, grab some water, then pull it back up. Great in an emergency. However, I don’t think it will work if there’s a submersible pump already in the well casing, since the pipe and wires will be in the way.
My parents lived about 30 km south of Ottawa and they were without power for nine days. They had a gas fireplace in their living room and camped there for the duration and did a ton of BBQing. They came to our place, in Ottawa, a couple of times to shower and have coffee etc. If I recall correctly, though the gas fireplace was doing a good job, it wasn’t quite good enough over nine days and they were glad when the power came back.
Thanks, Machine_Elf. You did an excellent job of answering my questions.
I think Mr. Middon and I would probably do okay if I stockpiled some water. Not sure I want to do that, and of course gallons of bottled water seem to be missing from grocery shelves due to COVID shortages. But if we had the water and natural gas stayed operational, I could use my stovetop and french press to make coffee, so one necessity of life would be available.
I always seem to have about an extra month’s worth of my blood pressure meds. I think anyone who needs medicine that has a decent shelf life should probably push the timing for refills a bit so that they have a reasonable stockpile available. (I didn’t set out to do that, but it did work out that way.)
I’ve never lived on a private well. If need arises, how easy is it to hoist the pump and its power cables out of the bore? Is that something the homeowner can do by hand?
Even assuming that’s a can-do, hoisting water up from a 200-foot well by hand sounds like an unpleasant task. The product you listed holds ten pounds of water, and I’m guessing it probably weighs 2-3 pounds empty. I guess it’d get you through a crisis with enough water to drink and cook with, but until the power outage is over, I’d have everybody at my house peeing outside to minimize the need for flushing toilets.
My late father-in-law worked on those pipeline pumping motors for a fair amount of his career. My recollection, from what he told me, is that the pumps that they made did, indeed, use a small fraction of the natural gas in the pipeline for fuel, but as you note, I’m not sure if the pumps could run without electricity.
What are the difficulties? Does it require a lot of care/caution, or is it just that a big-ass pump along with a few hundred feet of cable and hose weighs an awful lot?
Our well is 80 feet deep. The pump failed in 2012. My friend does well work on the side, so I called him. He came over with a three-wheel pump puller that looked just like this. That thing made the job easy.
As for your questions… The pump is cylindrical, maybe 20 inches long or so. The pipe is plastic, and semi-rigid. As we were pulling it up, the pipe went straight up in the air, and then bent down onto the grass about 15 or 20 feet away. Apparently the subtle bending of the pipe doesn’t hurt it. And there’s a pair of 240 V wires going to the pump, too.
Depends on the well; but for many homeowners, working alone, no way. For a strong person, or several people, for a lot of wells it would be possible.
Basis of info: watching the pump be pulled from my 100’ deep well. Looked a lot like @Crafter_Man’s description, except that as I remember two repairpeople did it by hand.
You’d also need the wrenches to get the cap off; and maybe some WD40, as it probably hasn’t been off for some years. They should be fairly ordinary wrenches, though.
By the way – after you put the whole assembly back in, you need to disinfect the well. While that pipe was lying down on the ground it could have gotten all sorts of stuff on it, and bits will wind up back down the well when it gets put back.
– When I had a new well put in, having discovered that the well in use when I bought the place was producing only about a quart and a half a minute (with the result that you could take a bath or do the laundry, but if you wanted to do both you had to wait a couple of hours inbetween and in the meantime not flush the john too much), I had a hand pump put on the old well; precisely so that I’d have potable water when the power goes out. I got teased about it until, a couple of years later, the Northeast had a major ice storm. Power was actually only out here about half a day, as we were only on the fringe and were lucky enough not to have any trees land on the line on this road; but a major city nearby had significant numbers of people who had no power for a couple of weeks.
Most people don’t have a spare hand pump well, though. If the well itself hadn’t been pre-existing, it would have been pretty expensive.