Six Days, Seven Nights
If you haven’t been following the news, most of the Puget Sound area lost power at around 8pm last Thursday night. The outages were caused by a righteous bitch-slap of a wind storm which downed about 82 billion trees, most of which fell on nearby power lines. A large number of power poles couldn’t withstand the added weight and snapped as well. Folks at the various utility companies estimated that just over one million customers were affected (in the dark). Note that one customer is equal to one subscriber or household, and since they use a 2.8-humans-per-household average, there were over three million people sitting around wondering when they were going to be able to watch Seinfeld reruns and daytime soaps.
We’re fortunate enough to have a gas range, gas water heater, and gas fireplace, so we got on ok. It’s funny, though, how one’s priorities change the longer one finds oneself in this new environment. My first thought was, like many people, entertainment; What about the TV? What about movies? What about surfing the web? Whatever will I do?? Ultimately, we played Scrabble. We played a lot of Scrabble.
Next comes food, as you start contemplating the relative decay rates of milk vs. meat vs. cottage cheese vs. Velveeta. The Velveeta wins handily, by the way. Nothing else even comes close to its freakish longevity and just gets tossed out.
Next on the list, not far behind food concerns, is heat. As the first night wore on it got steadily colder in the house, even with the gas fireplace roaring away. We spent many hours huddled on the floor in front of the fire, and I can’t help but think that it’s similar to being on the moon with its 400 degree difference between light and dark. Leaving the fireplace’s 4 foot sphere of influence was a dreaded event, an action reserved for only the most dire of needs, the lot of which I’ll leave to your imagination. I realized on the third night that our thermostat bottoms out at 50, but with frozen puddles and bowls of dog water outside, I can easily assume that it was considerably less than 50 degrees in the house. We eventually rearranged the furniture and moved the couch within a couple feet of the fire.
At some point over the weekend we decided that buying a generator was a good idea. Evidently about three million other people came to that conclusion as well, as every store I called was sold out. Even the little DC to AC inverters you plug into your cigarette lighter were all gone. The reports that I got indicated that all stores in the state of Washington were sold out of any device that could power a light bulb, let alone a furnace. One Home Depot employee said that they’d received a shipment of 130 generators the night before and had sold out in a little over an hour. Another shipment of 40-some generators the same night sold out in 22 minutes. I was about an hour from departing for either Boise or Portland when a friend called to tell me that Lowes in Issaquah had 5 generators stacked up by the front door. I called to pay for one over the phone, and took it home that night. And Oh!
Let me just say that again.
OH! What a fantastic toy! I read the directions (mostly) and proceeded to rig my new personal power plant up to the house in the most frighteningly improper and fire code violating manner I could devise. I soon learned that there are some things that you really don’t want to do with a 5000 watt generator. I learned these lessons the loud “b’zappy” way. I learned them in the “wait, is that a bad smell?” way. Once connected properly, however, that little thing powered up the furnace, fridge, lights, lamps, stereo, TiVo, plasma and tube TV’s, vacuum cleaner, microwave and conventional ovens, and the dishwasher at the same time. Not bad for $500, and it increased my Spark Plug Grunt Score to 23.
As far as our house and property, we faired rather well. A tree fell onto our tubular steel gate, folding its previously uniform shape into something you’d expect to see in a Hellraiser movie. And we lost a shingle from the roof. At least I think it was ours. I found a stray shingle in the back yard, and while it looks like one of ours, I couldn’t see where it may have come from. I climbed out the bedroom window onto the roof and spent a bit of time shimmying around in an attempt to locate the origin of said shingle. I’m not really comfortable on rooftops so tend to go up there as little as possible, but this time wasn’t too bad. The air was crisp, the sun was peeking out between the clouds, and all was quiet and still. Well, except for the constant drone of chainsaws and generators, and the occasional tikka-tikka-tikka of falling leaves and twigs skittering down the slope of the roof. Abandoning my search for the chink in our house’s armor, I turned to shimmy my way back toward the bedroom window and realized that the tikka-tikka-tikka sound was not, after all, leaves and twigs. I instead found myself face to face with the source of the noise. Katie. The beagle. Just standing there, grinning wildly, her grossly oversized and slightly East-West eyeballs bulging from her head, her tail whizzing about in its odd figure eight-esque patterns. “Hi dad!” she said. “Whatcha doin can I help hey what’s that over there wow this is pretty high up I’ve never been this high before sure would be bad to fall from up here what’s the matter you look surprised do I have something in my nose?” I stared back at her for a long while and finally spoke the words that had been feverishly bouncing against the inside of my skull.
“What the fuck … ?”
Our particular ‘hood came back on this morning, which is fine with me I suppose. I’d gotten rather used to living off of a generator, and frankly I kinda liked it in a super geeky livin-off-the-grid sorta way. Of course, we can now do laundry, which’ll be nice not only for us, but for my office mates as well.
So here are some of the things that I learned and/or noticed living in a city without electricity:
- Porcelain can, in fact, get quite a bit colder than previously believed
- Gas water heaters are the best things since … well, screw sliced bread. Gas water heaters are the best invention since the dawn of man
- Hanging your clothes in the bathroom while you shower really does remove wrinkles
- Toothpaste at temperatures below 50 degrees will give you a toothache on contact
- Faucet gaskets were not designed to be repeatedly frozen and semi-thawed and will eventually start leaking, usually under the bathroom sink where they drip for days before being discovered
- After a couple days of no power, refrigerators, ovens, and microwaves just become extra cupboards and pantries
- People still don’t truly understand the fundamentals of taking turns at uncontrolled intersections
- And small dogs are much better at traversing rooftops than we humans