Good Morning, Jim,
And yes it is a good morning at that. I’m here in the suburbs of Ohio between Dayton and Cincinnati. Our power has returned. I read Larry in Cincinnati’s post this morning, and I know his thoughts and feelings all too well. Like him, we had the preparedness mind set already in place, and fared a bit better than some of our neighbors. I only caught the tail end of your interview on AM 700 WLW in Cincinnati in my truck as I was heading to work ( the company I work for is on a different power grid and was up and running) Monday, and I could not help but think of some of the posts since I have been coming to SurvivalBlog, and some of the things that you have discussed on the site.
Like Larry, I hope this will be a wake up call to folks, but sadly, I know that only a small portion of them will get it. One of the things that I found to be spot on, was the part about the things that were stripped from the shelves of the few stores that were open. I did not see them first hand, but a few of my neighbors had gone to them, and they were an exact carbon copy of the list. One even told of folks heading to the toy department, to snap up all the Hannah Montana kids’ flashlights. Yep, batteries, camping stoves, lanterns, canned goods, candles, etc; Like I said, the list was so dead on it gave me a shiver. As I stated earlier, we were a bit better prepared, so we had no need of anything to get us through this minor inconvenience left over by the storm.
Folks down in Texas are going to be without power, water, food, and other needed supplies in some areas for many weeks to come, so our prayers go out to them more than the folks down the block who lost a small bit of food in their refrigerator because the power has been off for a little less than 48 hours. There was some talk of the possibility that it could have been out for a whole week, and this would have been a pretty bad thing for sure, but the thing that I voiced the most concern to my neighbors about, and the one that none of them had thought of was, that if it did take that long, there was a good possibility that the water tower that sits on the hill above our house would run dry, and without power to run the pumps to refill the tank. But, we were okay here, because we had filled half of our five gallon water cooler jugs a few days before this happened, and I had gone to the grocery on Friday, and had bought a case of 20 oz. bottles for my son to take in his school lunches. Cooking was not a problem, we have a charcoal grill,and I have a Coleman white gas fuel stove and a good supply of fuel for emergencies such as this. Plenty of flashlights, a battery powered lantern, spare batteries, oil lamps and oil, and candles with good sturdy candle holders for light, and a couple very good multi-band radios, and plenty of batteries for them as well.
I hope that others here in our tri-state area that were affected by this will see the need to prepare for things like this. I know that a few of my neighbors will be a bit better prepared for things by talking to me, and seeing how we were set up at my house for this. Now this is not to say that I was totally prepared. I saw a few “flaws in the slaw “, but preparing for these types of things is a constant and on-going process, and we do the best we can with the hand we have been dealt. The rest, we can adapt if we put our minds to the problems and keep a cool head. – Dim Tim