Powerless

On Dec 14th, around 7:30pm, the lights went out around the Puget Sound area. A major windstorm was on our doorstep and losing the power would be the beginning of a seven day adventure.
Usually when your power goes out, you reach for a flashlight, light a few candles, tell some stories and hope it doesn't last longer than a few hours. The winds, however, were just getting started. Throughout the night, the winds would get stronger and our house sounded like it was inside a wind tunnel. I couldn't sleep and stayed up looking out our window at a corridor of trees that, if knocked down, would hit surrounding homes including ours.

At 2:00am, Friday morning, a gust came through that bent trees northward all the while willing them to stay upright. It knocked down one of them and I heard it snap out of the ground and crash onto what I thought was the road above our home. The winds carried on for a few more hours and slowly died down through the remainder of the morning. I only managed a few hours of sleep that night. When I awoke, I learned the tree that crashed down earlier, fell into the middle of our neighbor's home and split the roof into two halves. The homeowner wasn't injured and got out unscathed. Wow.

The storm passed and left us and the region without power and lot of problems (see the Seattle Times photo gallery). After looking over our property, I thought everything looked okay except for a few downed branches and a broken fence latch. After further inspection, I discovered a branch about seven feet long that had penetrated our roof like a javelin (see December's photo #20). I climbed onto the roof and pulled out the branch that pushed a foot through the shingles, past the 3/4 inch plywood, into our attic. That's usually something you read about with tornadoes or hurricanes.

The power would stay off for another six days. We did have a gas water heater and stove that would allows us to at least take warm showers and heat our food. The nights would be cold with our only heat source coming from a gas fireplace that that put out enough heat to warm a dog house. While our weather is usually quite moderate, the temperature dropped below freezing each night which was enough to keep some of our refrigeratables outside for a few days.

During this time, we got to know our neighbors better, acquired a generator (thanks again to a neighbor) and by the following Monday, had our heater and lights running again. We were even able to wash a few loads of laundry (no dryer—takes too much power) and run the garbage disposal—pure luxury at this point.

Without power, one of the first things you notice is that it runs everything! We take it for granted and that without it, there isn't any light, heat, computers, internet, garage door opener, refrigeration, microwave and on and on. Our modern society comes to a halt with the requisite power to run it.

Thursday Morning, Dec 21st, we had a knock on our door from a neighbor. Power had been restored to our neighborhood. It was an early Christmas present that took no time to open. We also had to turn off and disconnect the generator before turning on the main switch to outside power so we wouldn't send power back to folks working on the lines.

This was a good test for us and the area. A lot of lessons will be learned from this. We are prepared as much as one can be for situations like this, but ultimately, we're powerless to the forces of Nature.