Disaster stress test
March 12, 2024
I started writing this the week after the weekend’s events but ran out of time and energy to finish it as we cleaned up.
I knew that the weekend’s atmospheric river could bring us some real grief. High winds are dangerous – we had a narrow miss with our car and a lamppost in last year’s last big storm. Floods from the excess rain are dangerous, too. We keep getting just soaked a week or so ago so the soil’s not ready to absorb any more, making flooding more likely. Our own neighborhood is less likely to flood but still, being aware of the risk, we try to stay out of the way as much as we can.
We’ve been added to our emergency / disaster preparedness kid over the past several months. Our latest purchases were a set of cheapish lanterns and an expensive electric generator on Black Friday. The Yeti 3000x was on sale but I still wondered if that was an extravagant overly paranoid purchase. I stopped second-guessing this weekend. In fact, I think we need a second one!
Day 1: Our power went out several times on Sunday, so of course, hubris set in. I stopped worrying so much about a few hours of outage at a time. Then it stayed out the last time. PGE gave us a really big window for power restoration on the last one, and the affected area on the outage map showed that well over 10,000 residences were affected just in our region. This was true of the top half of CA on the outage map. That last estimate was well past the 4 hour window of safety for the perishables in the fridge, so we hauled out the Yeti and went through all the first time set up pains by lantern light while I grumpily kicking myself for not doing the test run I had intended to do before we needed to. The kids squabbled, played, and bickered while PiC and I discovered the shortcomings of our plan: the extension cord for the fridge seemed like it didn’t work, the extension cord has to be flat for the fridge to be pushed back again so it instead had to hang out obnoxiously blocking our path.
Day 2: We snuck the behemoth over to PiC’s work into an abandoned corner to charge. We knew that charging devices was permitted but felt sheepish about bringing the whole power station. We got enough power to get both freezers back down to 0 degrees and keep the fridge running overnight.
The libraries were opened for charging services too but we didn’t want to take up an outlet spot away from someone who didn’t have an alternate location to go to. All the local businesses in our local area are down. It was so weird to see all blacked out while it’s business as usual across town.
Our 6 pm power restore time was pushed AGAIN to midnight and at this point I’m skeptical we’ll get anything.
Can’t vacuum, can’t run the dishwasher, can’t wash clothes. Kinda feeling like I’m in a weird version of Vietnam on grandma’s farm where everything shuts down at sunset because there’s only generator electricity and that’s wasteful if you don’t need it.
This was probably the least worst case scenario possible, so it was perfect for a stress test. Boy, was it stressful. We made it through this ok, but the many gaps in our coverage make me uncomfortable.
What we’ve learned
We need better lanterns. The UST solar LED lantern is the best one but sadly we only bought one several years ago. I was being cautious of buying too many at first without testing them first. Too cautious, they’ve discontinued the exact one we have and love. This is the one they have now. I’m really hoping the quality of this one is just as good.
The Yeti can run the fridge off a full charge for 31 hours uninterrupted with about 40% charge left. It can probably up to 36 hours or more uninterrupted. The fridge draws a range of 8 to 420 watts variably. We can stretch that even longer if we unplug it for 2-3 hours at a time every so often. We bought an extension cord for the fridge, so that it can be plugged into the Yeti without being pulled 2 feet away from the wall, and I did another stress test. It can keep one fridge going for a full 24 hours with 9.7 hours left until it ran dry. We could stretch that out by only keeping it plugged in for 4-6 hour intervals as needed.
We need more variety in food. PiC and I both felt sluggish after the high carb Mountain House dinner the first night. Maybe that was mostly the stress that was dragging us down but it’s worth being more on top of the variety. REI had a 10% off backpacking food sale so I ordered 13 replacement Mountain House meals, a few of the same, a few new meals, to replenish our stock. This gives us variety in types of meals but not the starch theme so I’ll have to figure that out.
Edit to add: we also have the Anker Power Bank 737, and the Anker PowerCore+ 26800, plus a very old Anker PowerCore 13000. These covered our phones, lanterns and other smaller miscellaneous things that needed USB charging. We never ran them down this time. I keep them fully charged between uses just in case.
Wow! That all sounds crazy! I’m glad you were prepared!
The last major disaster we had we turned out to be ok because we’re in the same electricity zone as a core utility, so even though much of the county (including just a few streets over in our neighborhood) was without power for days and/or subject to lengthy random rolling blackouts, we were fine.
Feeling a little guilty that PG&E started doing dividends again, but also suspicious that that may have only been temporary.
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It was a WILD ride (with a lot of stress and cold and tired and feeling STRETCHED) but I also went into it with a whole lot less anxiety than was probably normal for me. I think it’s a combination of therapy, having SOME preparedness in place, and really just underestimating how bad this particular storm could get. After all, last year we had FAR more serious storms and it wasn’t half bad for us at least. I guess in some ways, ignorance can be bliss after all.
You might as well get some benefit from PG&E being feckless. Someone’s going to, might as well be someone I LIKE.
I would welcome some of your thoughts and plans on the emergency food front. I think about it from time to time. With my food allergy on board, I think I would have to live on no-cook pantry things for however long the problem lasted.
We could also theoretically cook outside on the camping grill, but we haven’t used it in years and I’d be very surprised if we even have fuel for it anywhere.
…writing this is making me think that having fuel for the camping grill would probably get us around most of the cooking issues. Even if we were cooking in the rain or a snowstorm, we’d still be able to make hot food using our usual supplies….
We have 3 Celiacs in our family plus I have a couple mild food allergies, so I feel ya! I have a 3-tiered approach to emergency food. Tier 1 is simply eating up the dairy, fruit, veg, & meat from our chest freezer and fridge, plus our normal shelf table food like cereal and bread. Most of that food will be pleasanter if reheated but could be eaten cold in a pinch. That would usually last us a few days (and reduce wastage losses). Tier 2 is that since I cook a lot of things from scratch and we buy several things in bulk, we nearly always have shelf-stable staples like flour, rice, oatmeal, sugar, oil, canned soup, and more on hand. So as long as I have some way to boil water and/or heat a skillet (via our natural gas stove, on a grill outside, or set up a camp stove with fire pucks in the yard) I can cook basics like oatmeal, pancakes, soup, etc. Tier 3 is that our pantry contents fluctuate and refrigeration can become iffy, so I also keep a separate emergency food cache stocked with a flat of canned vegetables, canned or dried fruit, canned meat, pasta & jarred spaghetti sauce, dry milk powder for the kids + nondairy milk single-serving cartons for me, chicken & beef broth, instant mashed potatoes, extra canned soup, and protein bars. (I used to have dehydrated vegetables in my stash for soups/rice pots, but I ended up deciding that the cost to replace those annually was too much to justify. Canned vegetables are cheaper, and everything else is stuff we eat on a regular basis so rotating it doesn’t cost us extra.)
Bethany’s answer is more thorough than mine is at the moment for the specifics on the food!
I’ve been leaning hard on the emergency meals to keep things really simple: You only need hot water and utensils. Canned foods and the like gets a little more complicated but I should work on that because we don’t want to live off just the emergency foods if we have a choice.
I’ve been wavering on how I plan to tackle Tier 2 PREP for food. Tier 1 is what happened last month: loss of power but no damage to structure or gas lines so it’s safe to use the stove to heat water.
I was going to add a camp stove for this tier but it doesn’t really make sense to, I think that’s Tier 2 is when we lose power and we have structural damage that prevents the use of the main stove. Then a camp stove would come in handy.
Tier 3 would be loss of power plus either we lose gas lines or we have structural damage that makes it unsafe to have an open flame at all. I’m not sure what to use in that case.
We have a 8500 watt gasoline powered generator at our vacation cabin and a 5800 watt generator at our main house. We can’t run everything at the same time but we have heat and air, hot water, lights and all the appliances except the clothes drier. We’ve gone up to ten days with no power twice in the past when major ice storms took out most of the grid in our half of the state. I don’t think a big battery like the Yetti would provide enough juice for us but it is definitely a workable way to keep the fridge/freezer from spoiling all the food.
I think that’s the benefit of the gas generators, you can keep some gas on hand and refill them as needed, whereas with the Yeti, once you’re out, you’re out. Well, that’s not totally true, we could get solar panels for it. We just don’t get enough sun to rely on that very much but that is one good backup to the backup.
I’m amazed you were able to make it ten days without power on your setup, that’s solid!