How 50 Hours Without Power Recharged Me

Sunday, February 24th, 2019 started out like any other Sunday. I slept in, started some laundry, and checked some stuff online. I was busy doing some other writing when I happened to glance up at the skylight in my office and it was getting covered with snow. Where we’re at is considered “the valley” of this area and no one was predicting snow below about 1000 feet. Still, not really unusual. We get dustings of snow here and there, typically in the months of January or February. We may see a total annual snowfall of 4"- 6" on an average year.

By 5pm, the snow hadn’t let up. There was probably already about 4" of it on the ground. I was chatting with my mom (who lives about 5 miles away and at a slightly higher elevation) and she was talking about how much of it had fallen over there already. At about 5:30 p.m., we had what we like to call, “power blips”. The power going out around here is also not incredibly unusual, but it’s usually not out for very long … maybe 15 minutes to a couple hours. The longest outage we had experienced since we moved here in 2007 was about 4 hours.

At about 5:40 p.m. the lights went out.

My other half, who was sitting on the couch downstairs exclaimed, “Whoa! There was just a huge flash of light out by the road!” So we figured a transformer blew. Within an hour, we were seeing multiple large flashes coming from all directions. The next couple hours and into the night we could hear large cracking sounds coming from outside. Large trees and tree limbs were cracking from the weight of rapidly accumulating, wet snow. We lost cell phone reception and were pretty much cut off from the rest of civilization.

4 hours in ….

At about 4 hours into our adventure, it was blatantly apparent that the “snopocalypse” was real. The problem was, it was also unexpected. Unprecedented might even be a good word it for it. Usually when the news hypes up a snopocalypse, either nothing happens or we get about an inch of snow and we all move on with our lives.

Past the 4 hour mark, our house, which has great vaulted ceilings, had dropped about 10 degrees from the normal 68 we try to keep it at in the colder months. We stared at our busted gas fireplace and mentally kicked ourselves for not having it fixed long ago. At least we were able to heat up some food and tea on the gas stove. At 10 p.m. we called it a night, but I really didn’t have a good feeling about the power being magically restored by the time we woke up. It took me forever to fall asleep because prior to this event, I’d gone way off track from a normal sleep schedule and was going to bed at about 2 a.m.

The Morning After

I woke up at about 6:30 a.m. from light streaming in the windows and one of our cats sitting on me wanting breakfast. Juno doesn’t like to wait for breakfast. I checked the temp and we were down to 52 in the house. I put on extra layers and shuffled out to the kitchen. After taking care of the feline food crisis, curiosity got the better of me, so I went out onto the deck with a ruler and my camera. It was just about 9".

We made scrambled eggs and hot tea then roamed around every corner of the house to see if we could get more than 1 bar of cell reception. We couldn’t. In some areas, it just went straight to No Service. My guess was that a tree took out a cell tower. Shortly after that, this started happening ….

So more snow came down hard for another few hours. When it finally stopped, I put on my snowboard boots and jacket and walked down to the end of our street. The last time I’d walked around in snow like that I was at a ski resort so it was pretty surreal to be walking down my own street in like a foot of snow. Our small cul-de-sac and the main road were a total mess. Even though I’d actually seen snow plows going by on the main road right after I woke up, they hadn’t been back.

One of the neighbors had braved getting out. My plan was to wait another hour or so and try to do the same and see if I had cell reception in town.

A very cold, hot mess.

After unhooking the garage door so we could get it open, I climbed into my Jeep Wrangler, started it up and slowly backed up into all the snow on the driveway. 4 wheel drive was a necessity. I made it down our street and onto the main road. At least any other vehicles I encountered were driving at about 25mph max. A few of us formed a little caravan and slowly made our way the 5 miles into Roseburg. Town was of course, a wasteland. I figured my first stop should be the first grocery store on the main road as I knew they had limited generator power in outages.

The store itself had already thrown out all frozen and refrigerated items since they’d probably been without full power since around the time we lost it the previous night. I was impressed that no one was freaking out. As a whole, rural Oregonians do seem to be a hardy lot. Things like bread and baked goods were pretty picked over. I didn’t compose a list so I just kind of wondered around picking up some random things. I bumped into several people in the wine aisle and we all had a laugh about getting, “the essentials”. Amazingly enough, the store had checkouts functioning for credit cards, so I didn’t have to blow all my cash there.

The roads looked passable enough that I headed across town to check on my friend who happens to live in our rental house. It was a balmy 43 in the house over there. He and his cats looked none too pleased, but at least the cats had fur coats. We threw batteries in the gas heat stove and it actually fired up, so that was exciting! And then right as I was about to leave, the power came on there. Fortuitous. So I left and 4 wheeled my way out of that small street and back onto a main street to get home. I stopped once along the way to find I did have cell reception so I made a few calls, including one to AT&T, where they confirmed that the cell tower closest to our house was indeed down.

Thankfully, I’m not addicted to technology…

but I do like to be warm. And warm was not something our house was by the time I got back. We’d lost another couple degrees. I also had the whole rest of the day of unstructured time and an airtight excuse of why I actually couldn’t do any work. I still made some vain attempts to get a few emails and texts out. I remembered my dad had bought me a solar powered cell charger, so I busted that out and set it in the office window. Worked as advertised, so that was cool!

By this time, it has been since Sunday evening right before the power went out that I had looked at a computer. I had not-so-secretly been needing a decompression, I just never imagined this was how I would get it. As the day went on, I felt more and more relaxed, even though we had no idea when the power was coming back on and from the looks of town, it felt like an actual disaster was going down. The cold did start to annoy me though. I’m the one who jokes that anything below 50 is legit freezing temps to me (I’m from Southern California … we’re a semi-arid desert people). So I hopped on the exercise bike, I washed dishes by hand (we’re lucky enough to have a gas water heater), I swept the floors with an actual broom (sadly, my Dyson did not hold its charge after 24 hours with no power), dusted the furniture, and took a hot shower. At least the snopocalypse would be clean.

24 Hours With No Power

It had officially dipped below 50 in the house. So basically, legit freezing to me. I rummaged around in our back room closet for my sleeping bag. I bought this thing because 50 degrees along the Oregon coast is a reality at night, even in the summer months when we venture out camping. I think it’s rated into the teens, so it’s definitely warm. I rigged up a cocoon of sorts over the bed and by 8:30 p.m. had crawled in there, along with one of the cats, a book, a cup of hot tea, and my battery powered reading light. It was toasty, and warm, and I was pretty content.

When I opened up my book to read, it took me about a full 20 minutes before I realized that I wasn’t straining at all to see the print, even at close range. Typically, things are looking pretty blurry by that point in the evening for me after staring at a computer the entire day. So that was interesting. Guess computer eye strain causes more of my eyesight problems than I’d like to admit.

When I peeked out of my makeshift fort after reading for another hour, the cold air was just biting. I got up and fed the cats their late night dinner then made a bee line back to the only warm place in the whole house. I easily fell asleep and was toasty warm the whole night.

Real Change

I woke up naturally at around 6:15 a.m. This is some miraculous feat I’d been trying to achieve for who knows how long, and it just happened. On top of that, I actually felt like I got sleep. I wasn’t groggy or anything. I’ve heard that people recommend actually going camping to reset your internal clock and I will say that I often go to bed and get up a little earlier when camping, but there’s still late night campfires and stargazing and then “sleeping in” in the tent till about 8 a.m. This was totally different. I had energy and I actually looked forward to what sort of new post-apocalyptic adventures awaited me that day.

More scrambled eggs were made. Then I took our one cat, Hathor, who’s a Maine Coon mix, out frolicking in the winter wonderland. I looked at all the snow still on the sidewalk and driveway and the idea hit me to go buy a snow shovel. Also, since I came back from the store the previous day with only 2 bottles of wine, a head of cauliflower, and 4 apples, I thought it would be wise to make a list this time before I went out.

2nd Trip Into Town

I had heard the Sheriff advised people to only go out if they had to, so me and what seemed like everyone else, naturally went into town. I’m a big fan of disaster movies so I know that gas is a commodity in the post-apocalypse. There were a few gas stations open and the lines were abysmal at all of them, so I picked the one closest to the Home Depot. Ended up waiting in line with about 2 dozen other people who were not only filling their tanks, but filling up gas containers for generators (I told you, these people are hardy).

Gassed up, I headed over to Home Depot. Right in the front door, some savvy employee had set up a rack with snow shovels. They were plastic, but they were only $13.97 and beggars can’t be choosers and all that. I grabbed one and some extra batteries and as I was checking out, I overheard a guy ask one of the employees if they had any generators. After he stopped laughing, he said, “We sure don’t!”

I took advantage of the cell reception and made more calls and sent more emails and texts. On the drive back, someone had spun off the road right at the bottom of the hill going out of town. A couple people were there rope towing him out. I made a mental note to finally buy the winch for my front bumper as soon as I had internet access again.

I’ve never shoveled snow before.

True statement. I’ve also never had to shovel snow before. The first winter after we moved here, it snowed about 8" overnight, but in the morning, the sun came out and it was mostly melted by the end of the day. Every snow since then, it was either a small amount or melted off pretty quickly save for the one other year where temps dropped, it turned to ice, and hung out for a couple days. I started on the sidewalk in front of the door. Within about 90 seconds I somehow managed to break off a chunk of the plastic shovel (go me!) but it was no less functional.

I took a break to make a snow bunny.

I was just finishing the snow bunny when I saw the recycling truck turn up our street. How exciting, a visitor! So I ran out to meet him. He rolls down the window and says, “I know you guys usually have a bin out so I thought I’d risk it, then got up here and thought, wow that was stupid!”, as he looks around at the mounds of snow he drove through just to get to the end of the cul-de-sac. We had a chuckle about that and I went and got our bin and brought it out to him. I asked him if his house had power. He said he didn’t and that he’s been heating areas of his house with Mr. Heaters. It dawned on me I had one of those that we sometimes take camping. I wished him luck on the rest of his route, just as I noticed some of the neighbors dragging their trash bins out through the snow in hopes that the trash truck would be coming by next (it never showed). We all exchanged how we were surviving and I found out the neighbors all had working gas fireplaces. I made another mental note to call a repair guy as soon as I had cell service again.

90 minutes later I had made my way down the driveway with my busted, plastic snow shovel and gotten a full body workout to boot. Awesome.

About 10 minutes after I got done, it started snowing again.

A small amount of heat is better than no heat.

After the recycle guy sparked the idea (no pun intended), I went to get our Mt. Heater out of the garage. Don’t worry, it’s rated for indoors and outdoors with a low oxygen safety shut off. After some debate, we decided to set it on the kitchen island. We had half a dozen little propane bottles, so we hooked one up and got it lit. We pulled up two barstools and enjoyed the radiant heat. It actually warmed that small area around it up from 47 to 52. We heated up some Annie’s Organic Spirals and Cheese for dinner and happily ate bowls of that in front of Mr. Heater and his happy red glow.

Of course, the whole rest of the house was still a refrigerator. I already had on every piece of fleece I owned and I was still cold walking around so I wrapped a small, striped throw blanket, complete with fringe, around my waist like a long skirt. You do what you have to when you’re cold enough.

Meanwhile, it was still snowing.

48 Hours With No Power

Mr. Heater definitely helped lift our spirits, which had dipped slightly with the temperature, but we were fully prepared to ride this out, however long it took. There’s only so much control you can exert over a situation like this where you’re pretty much just forced to live a totally different existence than you normally do. You either do it and look at it as a new adventure, or you make yourself miserable.

The last 2 days did not go by quickly (and that actually wasn’t a bad thing). We were aware of the changing of the light from morning to evening. As evening came, the candles were fired up. There were long hours where you could just do whatever — read a book, shovel snow, take a walk outside, clean the house, play with the cats, hunker down in the thermal cocoon, etc. There was no tv blaring, no ding of texts or emails coming in. An actual other person was your contact with the outside world. Not gonna lie, it was nice. If we’d had the damn gas fireplace operational, it would have been really nice.

A couple hours after the 48 hour mark, I was standing in the kitchen with my makeshift “skirt”, warming my hands with Mr. Heater, and all the lights came on. There was a whir of noise as the HVAC system sprang to life and we both shouted, “The power is back!”, as if this was the appropriate and very obvious revelation to exclaim when the power comes back on after being off for 50 hours. Within about 5 minutes, the temp was already up to 55 degrees. I thanked Mr. Heater for his service, turned him off, and ditched the skirt.

The Aftermath

As I’m writing this now on 2/28/19 in a once-again warm house with power restored, 3 counties here in Southern Oregon have declared emergencies. Thousands of people are still without power, including my parents (who are from western PA originally, so they know how to survive in real winter … and they have a generator). 12+ inches of snow and we’re a disaster here.

Those of you in areas that experience winter weather like this on the regular have no idea how ill prepared parts of “the west” are for events like this. The heavy, wet snow caused a chain reaction to trees and powerlines. People are still digging out of it and crews are still working around the clock to get things back to normal. Our cell tower is still out, we haven’t gotten mail delivery since Saturday, and there’s going to be a serious flood watch if this melts too fast and it continues to rain, but at least the power (and internet) has stayed on.

In the most unexpected way possible, the 50 hours without power was just the recharge I needed. I got lots of exercise, I had plenty of time to relax, I gave my eyes a rest, and the sleep schedule I’d been struggling to adjust, adjusted itself.

And when I got the internet back, I finally ordered that front bumper winch.