It’s been a long time, but I believe it was either 9 or 10 days after Hurricane Ivan in 2004. We’re in a rural area, so not a high priority as fewer people in our section.
6 days after the December 2008 ice storm. No electricity, no water because we have a well, no heat except burning enough wood in the fireplace to keep it in the mid-50s.
1998 ice storm in Quebec and Ontario - no power for 3 weeks and no cable/phone for 4 weeks.
Roughly 4.5 days, after Irene hit New England in 2011. Some people in our town had no electricity for a week.
I’ve been really lucky. Since I’ve lived here (nearly 40 years), we’ve only had short outages. The longest? Not more than six hours. Last time the power went out during the last rain storm I checked with the utility for an estimated return of service. The power came on while I was dialing, and their estimate was for about five hours after that. Glad it was not true!
I lived in Redondo Beach over 40 years ago, and the power went out all the time, but never for very long and often at night. It’s when I bought a battery powered alarm clock, so I could get to work in the morning.
As a kid, we lost power for a week after the Blizzard of '78 in suburban Boston.
As an adult with my own place, I lost power for 72 hours after a winter storm that dropped a tree on the next street that took out power for our block. It took a surprising 3 days for the power company to get to it, because there were lots of trees down and we only lost power to about a dozen house so we were low on the priority list.
My power was out for a week following July 2003’s Hurricane Elvis. Almost 75% of the city’s power was out which made things very difficult. The few hotel rooms were immediately taken. There weren’t many grocery stores and restaurants with power so getting food was a challenge. Ice was unavailable after the first day until shipments arrived later in the week.
I worked for a hospital on generator power so I ate lunch and dinner there until the weekend. I found a Walgreens open and bought some ham, cheese, mayo and bread and a bag of ice for my small cooler and ate sandwiches all weekend. The temps were in the 90s so sleeping was miserable. But at least I could cool off at work. I spent my nights reading with a flashlight on my shoulder. I couldn’t believe how dark it was.
I’d just bought the house (my first) a few weeks earlier and it was quite a shock to realize that I was responsible for the massive cleanup of my yard. I’ll never forget looking out the window and thinking “that’s going to suck for whoever has to clean that up … oh, shit, that’s me!”. Thankfully the house was undamaged.
Eeek! I guess we lucked out only losing it for 2 days then. It barely brushed us and I remember being astonished that such an insignificant storm knocked out the power for more than a day.
In my adult life, I don’t think the power has ever been out for more than a few hours.
But when I was a kid, in 1978 an ice storm hit town and took out the power for several days.
We had gas heat, so it wasn’t as bad for us as it could have been.
While I’ve never had it come on that much earlier than expected, I’ve found that power does almost always come on noticeably sooner than the estimate.
I suspect that a lot fewer people yell at the power company because power came on sooner than they said it would than yell at the power company because it came on later, even if it’s ten minutes later; so they probably add an extra hour or two on to their best guess.
If we ever get a long and widespread power outage in/lasting into clear weather, I’m going to be the one outdoors yelling “Come out and look at all the stars!”
City people sometimes marvel at the stars you can see from here. But I have some memory of living out in the country back when few people had outdoor lights left on all night. Mine aren’t; but even in this rural area you can’t see anything all around the horizon except the accumulated light wash from houses and villages, including the ones twenty or thirty miles away.
I think about five days was the record, early 1995. Northern California winter storm/flooding.
Close-ish was probably in 2019/2020, same house, “preventative shutoffs”/wind-caused outages, mid to late summer. Though we weren’t actually IN the house for most of those stretches—evacuated—and when we WERE in, we’d upgraded to a generator, so at least had some basic amenities.
My opinion of Pacific Gas and Electric, over the decades, has settled to “slightly above The Three Stooges,” but considerably below the Marx Brothers.
A little over 2 weeks from Hurricane Michael (2018). Water came back (not drinking safe) a couple of days before power, internet took another 10ish days after the power was back to come back. The internet was a bigger problem - I could bring in power via a generator if I wanted to, and bring in water, but I couldn’t bring in internet - and all cell networks but AT&T were totally destroyed by the hurricane and AT&T was both missing some towers and so overloaded it was basically useless especially for internet.
Longest ever was actually in the present house, around two years ago, when a powerful windstorm damaged a local substation (plus obviously did a lot of other damage to the power infrastructure, which is why it took awhile to get things back to normal). Power was out for about 2½ days.
It wasn’t particularly a major ordeal. I spent a lot of time out of the house, and the rest of the time watching movies on my tablet or reading on my Kindle, and recharging them (and my phone) from a Li-ion power pack. I ate takeout – even nearby businesses were operating again within 24 hours, it was just residential streets that took longer to restore. The fridge was OK due to almost never being opened during that time. When the power came back on, the freezer stuff was still frozen, and the fridge part was still cool.
Ah, the Scotty gambit: Promise 'em four days and deliver in two. They’ll think you’re a genius!
We live in rural Ohio. We have a 4000 W generator. I simply connect to the house with a suicide cable when the power goes out. Has been working great for 20 years.
A week, and that was in the Philippines. In the US maybe 3 hours.
I read that the average consumer in Japan is without electricity for 5 minutes per year.
Not too long. Maybe 48 hours.
We had lost power, thinking it was a general outage, the kind we’d get frequently (a couple of times a year) in the rural area where we lived, but it was a whole day passing with no repair that made us suspicious. So we checked with the power company.
And they had had no reports of any outage at all! It turned out it was only us! The transformer on the pole right outside our driveway had blown! Our neighbours may have been affected too, but that week neither of them were home.
After that it took another day for it to finally get addressed, ipso facto, around 48 hours all up.
Does being overseas military count? Our Army base was without power for 3 weeks in 1968 when a diesel generator broke down and no parts were available. It was preceded by a slowdown when anything that relied on 60hz AC to keep time wasn’t working well, like clocks and movie projectors.
Heat wasn’t a factor, as we didn’t have any. But the lack of cold beer and fans was a serious problem.
Stateside, the longest outage in Wisconsin was when a tornado tore thru and brought down many large (2-ft diameter) trees, including one that landed horizontally on my roof and squashed the house. It was about 3 days before power was restored. It was in the summer, so heat wasn’t a problem, and if we needed water, we just filled a bucket from Lake Michigan.
Power went out Christmas Eve and came back Jan 2 or 3?
Thankfully I had a Honda 1500 generator. Just enough power to run the Fridge, tv, and a couple lamps. I’d unplug the Fridge to use the 2 burner hotplate. I had a old gas space heater that I hooked up in the living room. There was a valve already in the room. I just connected to it.
Biggest headache was keeping gas in the generator. Small tank that only ran seven hours. I refused to get up at midnight. So, we woke up every morning without power. My cans ran dry and that meant trips to a service station.
As my sister-in-law lives in a rural area, we always go look at the stars. After Hurricane Sandy came through, we did the same, but were amazed how noisy it was. Everybody who had a generator had it running immediately. So it was a bit darker, but cetainly not quieter.