55 hours without power

Storm Diary: 55 hours without power

Saturday, October 29, 11 a.m.
With an unseasonal snowstorm predicted here in Western Massachusetts, we’ve been hiking early in the day, watching the sky turn darker and feeling the deep humid chill increasing. We stop at the Amherst Farmers Market and dither over whether we have room in our very crowded freezer for a two-pound bag of organic local ginger root. We finally decide we can squeeze it in amid the bags of frozen corn and string beans from our garden. The farmer tells us to keep it frozen and just break off what we need, “or it will turn to mush.”

2 p.m. It starts to snow. The snow is instantly thick and heavy, and the ground rapidly disappears underneath it. 20 minutes in, our lawn and the street are completely covered.

4:30 p.m. I go back to my office after a break and discover that all my Internet programs have quit themselves. I’d had two browsers, two Twitter clients, and my online backup program going. Normally, if there’s a problem with the Internet, all except the backup program stay live and just report that the connection failed. When I reload my browser, I notice that it has lots its stored password file. My computer is a desktop, so if the power goes out for even a second, the whole thing has to reboot. But it stayed on, and all my non-Internet programs were fine.

6 p.m. Dina’s colleague and his wife have invited us to a Halloween party. They live about ten minutes drive. We have already decided not to go, but they send an email saying, “We’re Minnesotans, and were going ahead with it.” Dina writes back, “We’re New Yorkers, and we’re not driving in this storm.”

6:30 p.m. The lights flicker. Dina suggests we make sure we know where our flashlights and candles are. Good suggestion; we locate two flashlights and have to open a new pack of batteries for one of them. And we get our candles down from the inconvenient place where they usually live. Having stored a lot of water for Irene and not needed it, we fill just one large soup pot.

8:40 p.m. We have several power outages, each lasting only a couple of seconds. I am still restarting the computer when the power goes out again.

9:00 p.m. The lights go out and stay out. We light several candles. When it is clear that they are not going back on any time soon, I turn off various lights and unplug my computer, not wanting to stress things with power surges when power returns. Our phones are also dead. Looking around, it’s clear that the outage has affected the entire neighborhood; the only lights we see are up at our neighbor’s cow barn, and one dim light in their farm store. I use my cell phone to report the outage, looking up the number in my rarely-used phone book. The utility’s automated system tells me power should be restored by around midnight, and that 300 houses in my zip code are without power. We play Scrabble by candlelight and the candle fumes irritate my throat. Our gas stove has an electric ignition, but the burners light just fine with a match, so we make tea. One thing we do have plenty of is kitchen matches. At around 10:30, we go to bed. I expect to be woken up by my digital clock flashing 12:00 at me when the power comes on, but that doesn’t happen. We put one cell on Power Saver so we can check the time, turn the other off.

Sunday, October 30, 6 a.m. I usually sleep only 6 or 6-1/2 hours, but I managed to stay in bed for 7-1/2. I wake up and feel the chilly air, grab one of the flashlights and a fleece sweater, and stay in bed, reading. By about 7:15, I can put the flashlight away. Dina stays asleep until 8:30 or so. I suggest we find a warm place to have breakfast and check our e-mail. When we go downstairs, the thermostat in my office says it’s 51 degrees. A few phone calls yield nothing in our town or the next town.

We text to the status number at the utility. This time, the return text says the outage affects more than 3000 households in our zip code—the entire town. And there is no longer a time posted for restoration. Uh-oh!

We’re better off than a lot of other people. We can cook, we still have water, and our cars are not trapped behind electric garage-door openers that no one remembers how to operate manually. Dina’s laptop and my iPad have battery power, so we can write, even if we can’t communicate online. And our house is blessed with a very sunny dining room with French doors. As the sun pokes over the mountain, we relocate there and that room, at least, starts to be comfortable. It turns out to be a sunny and beautiful day.

11:15 a.m. We have plans to meet some friends several towns east of here and go explore an area we’d never been to. We can’t reach either their cell or their landline. In a moment of cold, housebound craziness, we decide to drive over anyway. Our car, at least, is nice and warm.

Outside, our farmer neighbors have used their plow to give us a huge head start on getting our cars out. Still, it takes a good half-hour to clear our walkway and the 8 inches of snow from the windshield and roof, and dig through the tall, thin wall of snow between us and the street.

The two-lane state highway we live on, Route 47, is shocking. Downed trees everywhere, and water all over the road. We stop on the way to dig out my 81-year-old stepfather Yoshi’s car and make sure he’s OK. We find him jauntily wearing a red beret and a bright sweater, heating water in a fondue pot over a candle. His apartment is much warmer than our house. Leaving his house ten minutes before we’re supposed to meet our friends, we leave another message and say we’ll be late.

And on we press. We dodge around several downed trees on the way to Route 202, a much more important state highway than 47. In the first town, Granby, it’s fine. Then we cross into Belchertown and it looks like a hurricane went through. Several places are down to one line, and in one spot, road crews have blocked off the road going the other way. Our friends are shocked when we actually show up, and we enjoy a nice visit. They have no cell phone service and no water, and an electric garage door opener, so when we hike at the Quabbin Reservoir and I notice a flashing beacon on a nearby cell tower, our friends grab the moment to call their son. And they are grateful for the bathrooms in the park. With colder temperatures in the forecast and the roads such a mess, we cut our visit short to get home well before dark.

Going back, we try to stay on Route 9, the major east-west thoroughfare in these parts. But we are diverted onto Bay Road and then diverted off again. And even on the roads that were still open, we had to drive under at least half a dozen hanging power lines. I know they have no juice at the moment, but it’s still scary. On the radio, we hear a report that one gas station is actually open, so we wind our way through yet another detour and get back on Route 9. For some odd reason, a half-mile strip near the junction of 9 and East Street in Amherst actually has power, and not one but two gas stations are open, along with a couple of stores. The line isn’t even too bad, and we gas up with only about three cars ahead. I thank the clerk for being open and for accepting credit cards on paper slips, and she tells me they’re almost out of gas. It takes us an hour and a half to make the normally 25-minute drive from Belchertown home.

4:45 p.m. We never really got lunch, and I prefer to cook while I can see, so I make an early dinner: hearty, warming food that doesn’t require opening the fridge (which we’re trying to keep closed): curried sweet potatoes and white potatoes, with dried onions and hot peppers from last year’s garden, and a can of chickpeas thrown in. Very satisfying, especially as the temperature in our house starts to drop again.

I think about what it must have been like for Captain John Lyman, who built the house we live in in 1743. He, of course, would have heated with wood, but he would be used to not having very much light once the sun went down, and if he were to ride a horse to Belchertown, it would have taken several hours each way. For the first few years he was here, he had no neighbors, and probably had to grow and store nearly all of his own food.

How much we take our modern life for granted! Computers run our heating systems, our phones, our cars. Cell phones would not have been an option even 20 years ago, but at that time, phones plugged right into the wall jack and didn’t need a power line to run. I actually go up to the attic to see if we have an old, featureless phone still, in the hope that our phone line might be working even if the electricity is not. But we’ve gotten rid of them all.

After dinner, my goal is to stay up until at least 9. I decline another candlelight Scrabble game, and we retreat to the bed where we play two games of Yahtzee under the covers. Oddly enough, I get three Yahtzees and rack up over 400 points. Then I jump on my exercise bike, read some more by flashlight, and turn in around 9:45. We are both sound asleep when our daughter wakes us by texting at the very reasonable hour of 10:15. And we both go right back to sleep, until 7:20. Amazing!

Monday, October 31, 9 a.m. It is 47 degrees in my office. I am wearing a turtleneck, a t-shirt over it, a fleece, a thick wool sweater, and a winter hat. My fingers and toes are really cold. We are sitting in the dining room, waiting impatiently for the sun to burn through the fog and make us warm.

10:38 a.m. The sun has burned through! But it’s a weak November sun. Instead of warming our whole sun room, it barely reaches the edge. We move our chairs right up against the French door to capture what little warmth gets through.

12:30 p.m. We drive over to my Yoshi’s, bearing a Thermos of hot soup—and joy of joys, he has heat and power (but no Internet, yet). We stay for several hours, charge our phones and portable computers using a power strip I’d brought in case we found a working cafe, and leave only to make a quick inspection of our property in Northampton, where we’ve received word that a tree has fallen.

And Northampton has power! We grab a quick 40 minutes to check high-priority e-mail before returning to Yoshi’s warm apartment; he has invited us for dinner.

10:30 p.m. Our normally energy-conscious neighbor’s house is ablaze with light. Every room seems to have a couple of hundred watts glowing away. Either I’m not used to seeing light bulbs anymore or he’s got some kind of supplementary system rigged up that is much brighter than his usual lighting. Our house, however, is still cold and dark. Wonder if the five local little kids came by for trick-or-treat? We had fair-trade organic candy to give them, but we weren’t here to dish it out.

Tuesday, November 1, 3:38 a.m. The sound of Dina’s printer kicking on (her workstation is in our bedroom). The digital clock flashing in our faces. And, hallelujah, the sound of the furnace kicking on in the basement! P O W E R !

6:22 a.m. The house temperature, set for 68, has climbed to 60. I’m used to that; every night before I go to bed, or whenever we go out for a couple of hours or longer, I turn it down to 60. I expect it will reach temperature within two hours or so. Now I have to reconnect with the world and deal with the no-doubt enormous backlog that has accumulated in my absence.

9:05 a.m. I try to make an outbound call and discover our landline is still out. Freshly-charged cell phone works just fine, though.

9:14 a.m. I receive my first incoming call. I hang it up, and there’s a dialtone. YES!