|
Day 4 so far of no power here in NJ. I am lucky that I only had some minor damage to my fence and believe in preparing.
I am sitting in my truck with my laptop/verizon air card plugged into a power inverter and have a few observations so far ( most pretty obvious but maybe worth repeating)
-Gas is next to impossible to get. Most stations have the gas in their tanks but no way to get it out. A couple resourceful guys down the street rigged up a hand cranked pump and were slowly getting gas out to people. No idea what they were paying. Defiantly was a reminder to look into getting a similar system for myself.
-Generators are loud. I can stand outside at night and pretty much pinpoint the houses that have them. I do not have one ( I will be checking craigslist a week or so after this all passes though ) but if I did I think I would only run it during extremely cold weather to keep the pipes from freezing in my house.
-Switching from a relatively healthy diet to a canned/shelf stable diet will reek havoc on your digestive system. I will spare the gory details but it is something to keep in mind.
- I am was more than prepared for this but my wife thinks it is just terrible what we are going through. I wish I would have thought of having more stuff on hand to keep her busy. Boredom is definitely a problem. I have yet been unsuccessful in getting her to sleep through the coldest/darkest part of the night and awake during the day. She is just not used to living without electricity. I can only imagine what those with kids are going through.
-Looting seems like only a minor problem around here. National Guard was called in pretty fast and curfew put in place. Neighbors are all usually outside during the day and keep an eye out on strangers that come through, which there is a lot of. I am assuming most of these strangers are contractors but I know that there are some wolves out prowling.
-Cell networks went down immediately. Luckily my relatives/family friends figured out to call and check in with a relative out of state. It probably is a wise idea to have something more formal set up. Trying to get a hold of someone in New York was next to impossible. It would make more sense to have a comm plan that involved checking in with someone a few states away instead of waiting for the stars to align and having two cells connect to each other.
|