Urban Survival 101

[AnyDream]

Are you prepared for when the electricity/gas/telephone supply is interrupted? One or two hours is doable, but what about when it's 6 hours, 12 hours, a day or more?

What things do you do to ride through unplanned events with the least disruption?

[~Hestia~]

Definitely not prepared for power, gas wouldn't be tooooo bad. This is something that DH has talked about, we need a plan!

[Jaycee]

Not prepared in the slightest!

Have you been affected by the power outages across the city MD?

[lilima]

Sort of prepared. Have torches charged and ready to go, as well as a battery operated radio. My issue would be if I needed to get the car out of the garage. There is a manual override, but I can't push it up high enough to get out 4WD out. So during extreme fired danger days I have to park it out of the garage as we are in a high risk area. The other thing about a long power out is the food in the fridge/freezer. We had a power out on Monday evening. It came back on about 12am, but it tripped our safety switch and not all of our appliances came back on - fridge included. We didnt notice until the next morning. We were just lucky that it wasnt a really hot night, and everything stayed frozen. Otherwise it would have been an expensive power out to turf everything in our fridge.

Our hot water doesnt work without power as we have a Rinnai continous hot water. So that reduces us to the gas stove top to boil water if needed.

Telephone is not too bad, we have a landline as well as mobiles. We have to have landline for DH's work as we need to have several ways to contact him if needed.

ETA during the rolling outages during the back sturday period of 2009, I filled the bath tub, and spent the day getting my huge preggy belly in and out of there as a means of staying cool. I dont cope without aircon. I have turned soft. Never had aircon growing up!

[Astrid]

We have torches, candles etc. We cannot be here for extended power outages, as it means we have no water. We have to use electric pumps for the water tank and bore.

[little_O]

We just had this, 24 hours without power, thank you extreme weather! My mum still doesn't have power so she's getting close to 48 hours!

Fortunately we still had a generator here from when we renovated. At least we could fire it up every now and then to get the fridge/freezer going and have a shower.

We have candles, torches etc. lucky for us it was a mild temperature day yesterday so the house stayed cool enough.

[No.5]

We have torches, battery-operated radio, spare batteries and candles etc.

Thankfully in the 7 years we've been in this house, we've only lost power once for about an hour or two so doesn't seem to be much of an issue.

[AnyDream]

Not prepared in the slightest!

Have you been affected by the power outages across the city MD?

Yes. This is the 2nd day it's been out - it's some kind of widespread meltdown. We also had a massive storm yesterday morning - trees etc down all over the place - but that's not the problem in our area. I boiled the kettle at 7.30 yesterday morning (ie - well after most of the storm affected areas lost their power) and the power trucks came through at 2am and revved their truck and flashed their yellow lights and shouted at each other outside my bedroom window - net effect: MD is cranky and sleep deprived but still no power.

So, besides food spoilage, the main impact to us has been lack of hot water - and no boiling water for tea/coffee (ie - morale takes a hit right there LOL). We can cook if needed on our gas BBQ, and I'm at the public library charging my devices and sucking up the internet like it's fresh air LMAO. But tomorrow it'll be much hotter, so the cooling/comfort part of it will kick in then.

I had the foresight to go and buy a solar/dynamo cranked lantern (FANTASTIC - and I'm seriously considering getting another), and a cheaper one for the kids (a total fail because they kept fighting over who was winding it and it had stuff-all charge). We didn't have batteries for the other lamp we had, and DH chucked our old esky away but never replaced it. Plus most of the supermarkets in the area also had outages so there was no cold food available anywhere. I also got a hexi stove and a small billy/kettle, so I can boil small amounts of water to sort out the caffeine crisis but not much else LOL.

What we did do well:
* zero-battery eco-friendly lantern
* bathed all members of the family for 2 days on the hot water still in the tank by allocating each person one bucket and a scoop (hey - it's how 90% of the world's population clean themselves - you stand in the shower recess and off you go).
* we prioritised hot water for hygiene & food preparation
* once we passed the 12 hour mark, we cleaned the fridge out immediately instead of leaving food to spoil.
* we kept the deep freezer closed the whole time so some of that food may still be usable
* I found a local cafe where they were happy to let me plug in my phone to charge, plus I've scoped out all the good power point spots at the public library .

Things I think we need to improve on:
* we need a storm kettle or metho-stove - to heat larger quantities of water for washing plus in a widespread or longer lasting emergency it would be better for heating/cooking packaged food than a BBQ.
* We need a new esky & add ice/dry ice quicker to our fridge/freezer.
* We should keep emergency batteries (for lamps) and a tranny radio.
* Information - as at 4pm yesterday, I was still unsure which supermarkets were open/had fresh or chilled food
* Phones - need some charging alternatives - solar? Identify more public places with power points? Get a car charger?
* think about diversifying household fuels - eg we would cope better if we had SOLAR (duh) - or a gas stove or hot water.
* Money - we don't have an emergency fund, but the extra expenses this week can make you vulnerable if you don't have a slush fund.
* Neighbours - we should get to know them a bit better. Knock on the door and check how they are doing, share info/resources in a crisis

No. 5., We've never lost power for this long either. It isn't something I expected to happen here.

[Miss.September]

We have a diesel generator!

When we moved here originally, the transformer to our pole was damaged and it took 72 hours to be replaced. We're rural, so no power means no water. We can live without gas as it's only the stove top that uses it and we have a wood heater. So if it came to it, we could be pretty self reliant for a while.