15 years ago I lived in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia where we only had 4-6 hours of electricity on good days and went 3 weeks in January with no gas and very little electricity and water. What I remember most is people burning their furniture on the sidewalk in oil drums to stay warm.
After losing power, I notice my whole house generator automatically turns on. I installed it after losing power for 9 days several years ago.
We had a severe ice storm in the early 2000s. Our electric was out 14 days. We had a generator. We rationed its use to essentials. We couldnt leave from here for 7 days because the roads were not cleared.The hwy. Dept. doesn’t have the resources around here for ice. The electric company were delayed getting to us, we are the only customer on our transformer.
We have wood heat so that was ok.
Almost 20 years ago we lost power for ~4 days during an ice storm followed by a fairly cold spell for us.
The house got colder and colder. This despite running a fire in the fireplace a lot. Just the family room stayed comfortable-ish. But even then near the end I was considering moving into the basement for the night since it stayed a bit warmer there.
One thing I noticed was the incredible amount of time I spent dealing with the fire. I had a large stack of cut logs. But they needed to be split, brought in, fed to the fire, etc.
Luckily didn’t come close to using up my pile. I would have needed an immense pile to last a winter in a 19th century type cabin. How much effort went into prepping for the winter back then? Especially without a chain saw.
OTOH, losing power in the summer for just an afternoon is horrid. Any longer and it’s definitely into the basement.
Living in a city, yeah, that was the first time I met a few of the neighbours, going round to check if they’d lost power as well (not my problem) or if it was just my flat (my problem). It wasn’t immediately obvious, because lights were still on over the road and in the shared corridor in the house. It turned out the top flat had lost power, the middle one had not, and the bottom one had. The other houses in the street were a mix, and people were also coming out of some of the out ones to check. It came back on after a few hours and we all went back to ignoring each other again.
I never did work out a good reason for why a house that was clearly all converted at the same time and all owned by one person would be on two different power supplies like that.
In pre-generator times, we lost power for multiple days on a few occasions.
Since this mostly happened during icy/snowy weather, we mostly hunkered down in a single room with dogs for extra warmth, rather than sharing the joys of communal misery with our neighbors.
I lost power for almost two weeks after Sandy. Something I noticed:
When you have no lights or heat, there is very little to do after the Sun goes down so I found myself going to bed extremely early and waking up extremely early. Once my office restored its power I would often go in at 5 am because at least there I had internet light and heat. It gave me an appreciation of the sleeping habits and life style of our forefathers.
We lost power due to thunderstorms for about 24 hours last spring, and it struck (heh) me just how much artificial light there is in my home, even when the lights are off. There’s light from the streetlights that makes its way in, plus glows from various electronics even when they’re powered off. You have to have a power outage to have true darkness, it seems.
We lost power for 17 days after hurricane Ike in 2008. The neighborliness definitely did increase. The city/Red Cross/Church/Fema/whoever was handing out ice at an intersection a few miles away, and five or six neighbors and I would take turns getting our trucks loaded with ice and handing it out to anyone along our road who needed it. I loaned a couple of ice chests out to people I had never met before. I had a chest freezer full of about fifty pounds of fish and shrimp that I had caught, plus the usual assortment of chicken and steaks and such, all of which was slowly thawing. Those of us with freezers grilled every day and fed numerous others so that nothing would go to waste. We were given beer and barbecue by strangers from across the neighborhood who just drove around handing it out from the bed of their truck.
I don’t think any of that was unusual. I’m in a different neighborhood now, but I’m sure the same thing would happen, and except for the scale of cooperation, it doesn’t have to be a real calamity like a hurricane. On an everyday basis if someone is known to have some kind of difficulty - whether it’s a tree blown down or a spouse in the hospital - people will be there with a chainsaw or casserole dish or whatever. That’s just what neighbors do.
We lost power for a week after Hurricane Sandy (Hoboken NJ). We had experienced severe flooding too, so it definitely had a post-apocalyptic feel to it. At first it was fine. During the day, people are out and about. A number of portable generators had been set up with power strips strung together so people could recharge their phones and groups of people would huddle around them, sometimes cooking food on portable grills. It started getting creepy after a few days though. The NY Waterway ferries had extremely long lines as the PATH and commuter trains to Penn Station were knocked out (possibly even bus service). So that just added to the “everyone trying to get the hell out of dodge” feel. Each night, you would see fewer and fewer candles in apartment windows as people evacuated to elsewhere. People started spreading crazy rumors about roving gangs in Brooklyn or criminals dressed as FEMA workers going door to door in Weehawken robbing people. After a few days of that, we went to my parents up in Connecticut when their power was restored, still dressed like characters from The Walking Dead.
Beaten to the punch! And by no less than Tamerlane himself!
I’ve been fortunate enough that I’ve never been through any serious multi-day power outages, but even for the relatively brief multi-hour outages we occasionally get here in Atlanta (thunderstorms, or very rarely an ice storm), I’ll second the “Boy, there sure isn’t much to do after dark, is there? Might as well go to bed!” feeling. Surf the net/read the Dope/check my e-mail? :smack: D’oh! Watch TV? :smack: D’oh! After dark, even reading an old-fashioned book is a PITA. (Candlelight < Lightbulbs)[sup]10[/sup]
first thing I realize is all our cordless phones run off electricy after an hour or so
oh and also once you remind the electric company you have a minor on a breathing machine how quickly your neighbor hood becomes a priority
The folks with backup generators stick out like a sore thumb. Not just because their lights are on while everyone else is in the dark, but because you can hear the distinctive hum of their generators. My across-the-street neighborhood and next-door neighbor both have backup generators. The racket always lets me know when the power has gone out in the neighborhood.
Also, there’s nothing more frustrating than being the weirdo on the block who doesn’t have power yet because you aren’t connected to the same network (or whatever they call it) as everyone else.
Around 40 or so weeks after a prolonged power outage, there is often a sudden rise in the birth rate.
Thanks to being in walking distance from an air traffic control center, our power gets restored pretty quickly - no more than an hour or two, and we were excused from the Enron induced outages some years ago.
We should be fine until the big one hits.
I look at the stars - no more light pollution. And if it is dinner time I look at the inside of what ever restaurant we go to. We know our neighbors already.