How to survive a power outage in the winter

Submitted by Patrick Grote on Tue, 12/05/2006 - 4:10pm.

Recently, the St. Louis area was hit by an ice storm and snow storm. The ice storm knocked out power to close to 350,000 customers, and we were one of the lucky ones to lose power.

Our power was out from 3:18am on Friday to 6:48pm on Monday. That's a total of 3 days, 15 hours and 15 minutes or 87.25 hours. The temperature in the house went from 68 when we woke up on Friday morning to 48 degrees when the power came on Monday night. This is pretty incredible considering the nights between outage and recovery were always under 15 degrees.

Anyway, we were woefully unprepared for being without power during the winter. When the power went out this summertime we only lost the food in the fridge and one hot night. This winter outage was soul crushing.

After going through the experience, I formulated the following list of things to have on hand:

1) Two generators: I am not sure about the specific size, but you need one to run the refrigirator and, in our case, a freezer. The second one can be used to power things like your fish tank, space heaters or entertainment devices like the computer, TV or whatever.

2) Wood: If you have a wood burning fireplace you should always have wood available. We had exactly six logs. I'd suggest ensuring you have two cords of wood going into the winter. Don't forget, like we did, to have your chimney cleaned in the fall. Even if we had the wood, we'd take a chance using the fireplace without it cleaned.

3) Candles: Our candle inventory is limited to decorative candles, and very few of them. They were sort of effective at night, but we really needed to ensure that we had candles that burned bright and long.

4) Flashlights: We are horrible about keeping our flashlights with fresh batteries. We had one or two rechargeable flashlights, but when we turned them on they were broken.

5) Lanterns: We had none. I would suggest buying one for each member of the family, so one lantern is always available. Obviously, but the battery or rechargable ones.

Since we weren't prepared, we were forced to leave our home for three nights. This meant paying for a hotel, eating out and other costs associated with not living at home.

A little planning can go a long way when the power is gone.