More Snowed-In Advice

The other day, I wrote about survival in place during inclement conditions. A friend of mine (who's admittedly far more of a "prepper" than me) posted some of his observations on Facebook, and I wanted to share them to a wider audience.

Things learned from the weather.

We lost power for about 24 hours beginning early Sunday morning. We have wood heat so heat was not an issue.

I have an Aladdin oil lamp my Dad got from my Grandpa and have reconditioned it and it works great. I also picked up one at a garage sale and got it going. They both work well. One thing I did notice was that the dark walls in our living room do not reflect light and it takes more sources to light the room.

We have a small generator that I used to keep the frig and freezer cold. Just ran it an hour on each one and everything stayed cold.

The LED lanterns work great and I will be adding one of those to the stash.

The generator burns gas pretty quick, about a quart per hour so if you had to run it all day that would be 6 gallons of gas.

Things like white gas and lamp oil go very quickly. In an extended outage, these items would probably be gone in the first week.

We used a propane camp stove to cook with. Just set it on top of our stove in the kitchen and it worked great.

Fortunately, we have city water and gas hot water heater. In the country you would need a generator to power your well pump, although that could be an intermittent thing.

Boredom sets in quick. We ended up playing Scrabble. We have tons of board games so we would have lots to fall back on. Plus, chores would start kicking in once the conveniences of modern day life were gone.

My experience was similar, although the closest I got to losing power was three blinks on Saturday evening. I didn't have a huge stockpile of food, but there was also no realistic expectation that I'd go more than two or three days without being able to leave the house. Even so, I probably would have needed to get pretty creative to keep myself comfortably fed for much longer; and even with cable and Internet access, cabin fever was still setting in. These are good lessons to learn in temporarily inconvenient situations, so that you can prepare for potentially prolonged disturbances.