Preparedness

   Last month's tornado showed me that I wasn't as prepared as I should have been.
1.  I knew that the last time I tried to start our generator that I couldn't get it running.
2.  I knew that when I tried to run the house on the generator the breaker kept tripping on the plug I installed for this secondary purpose, most likely because it is a GFI breaker, as required by code since the outlet is in the basement.
3.  I knew that the emergency cord I had made up when we lived in a doublewide trailer to feed the house from the dryer outlet was not long enough to reach the laundry room in the modular we built.
4.  I didn't know that none of the gas stations in town kept the generators they had brought in during the last big outage a few years ago.
5.  We didn't have any water on hand.

    The power went out just after 3pm on Thursday, July 26th.  My cousin lives a few miles out of town on the opposite side as us and their power was out too, and based on the number of trees we neighbors cut off the road just after the storm passed, I knew it was going to be awhile before the lights came on again.  After clearing all of the trees from the road except for the one tangled in the power lines, I decided it was time to see if I could get the generator running.
   When you NEED something, you pay a little more attention to details than when you WANT something done "just to check to see if it works".  It didn't take me long to figure out that I had turned the fuel off on the generator.  It fired up on the 1st pull after the valve was opened.
   We found some heavy duty extension cords and plugged in the downstairs refrigerators (mid-size fridge used during canning season and a college dorm fridge) and freezers.  We consolidated everything from our upstairs kitchen fridge/freezer to those downstairs for two reasons.  First, the fuller a cooler is, the easier it is to keep it cold and, secondly, we only had to run 2 extension cords, which is all we HAD.
   Around 8pm I called the power company, just to make sure they knew the power was out on our road; they did and they gave me an estimated time to restore of midnight, Friday.  My cousin called Thursday evening to gloat about having taken a shower because they got their generator hooked up and told us about no one having gas in town.
   On Friday morning, after running the generator long enough to get the freezers back down to 0º from 20-24ºF and running to my cousin's for a quick shower and 50 gallons of water, we set out to the next town over that had gas with the 1 good gas can that I could find.  I also had designs on getting another circuit breaker (non-GFI) and plug and cable from the hardware store there.  We stopped to get gas first, which was a good move because while we had to wait on the 2 people that arrived at the pumps just before we got there, the line behind us was 6 deep and growing by the time we left.  The station had 3 5-gallon cans left so I bought one of those; with the full tank of the generator that gave me about 14 gallons of gas, or enough to run about 67 hours continuously.  At the hardware store I realized that I didn't know what make of breaker I needed and they were out of receptacles anyhow.  I ended up paying 50-some bucks for a generator-rated 50-foot extension cord.
   Back at the house we figured out that we could run the emergency cord out the dryer vent to reach the generator.  It makes me nervous as heck to run it that way because if someone should throw the main back on to the grid, the consequences could be unlivable.  First on my list of upgrades is a proper flop-over switch.  Scratch that - I'm going whole house coverage!