Update on Irma: 6 Days without Power!

Sorry this post has taken so long to get up. I’m sure some of you were dying to know how we got through the storm. (kidding 😉 )

(this is the town 5 mins up the road from us right after the storm)

The STORM

Let’s just say the storm was a bit of a nightmare. Normally I wouldn’t have been worried about it but we have this tree in the backyard that looks like it might go any minute and we haven’t been able to cut it down yet. It arrived late Sunday night/early Monday morning while we were asleep as per usual. Why do all storms seem to hit when you’re asleep? It was basically a sleepless night. Between worrying about our house getting destroyed by that tree and the random THUMPs on the roof from branches and pine cones I was too stressed out to get much sleep. Then there were the loud CRACKs and THUDs of trees falling. Every time a really loud noise woke me up, I would get up and walk around the house to make sure our roof was still there. At one point I couldn’t take it anymore and kenneled all of the cats in a room far from the tree (the dogs were already kenneled and sleeping in our bedroom with us). Sometime after this we lost power. We guess around 6am.

Dawn of the 1st Day 144 Hours Remain

We woke up at 8 am to let the dogs out to go potty and feed them and the cats. While we were outside in the storm trying to get our dogs to go there was a loud CRACK. My husband and I watched as a tree about 20 feet from us started to fall. I ran for the house trying to get the dog to come with. No idea why I thought that would help. Thankfully, it fell away from us, just missing our fence and the electrical pole. Strangely it snapped a third of the way up the tree and managed to fall on the opposite side of the fence in our neighbor’s yard. The whole thing was pretty scary though. I’ve never had a tree damaged like that in a storm, let alone watched it fall.

As we woke up and looked around some more there were tons of large branches on the ground. One fell on our carport. If not for that our car would have been damaged. There was also a tree across our driveway. All in all we got very lucky. Any one of those trees could have damaged our house or property. A neighbor came by with a chainsaw to cut the tree on the driveway and that’s when we saw the large pine laying on the electrical line just down the road.

It rained the whole day and was dark enough that we had candles in almost every room. I kicked Chris’ butt at Yatzee twice. Mostly we didn’t do much, took it easy and assessed the damages. For lunch we finished off the leftover chili. This meant the fridge was mostly empty of perishable foods. The freezer still had 3 small packages of ground beef and 2 small steaks but we will eat those later.

For dinner we ate almost all of one package of ground beef as tacos. We had some tortilla chips laying around from one of our previous grocery trips so I decided to put them to good use. I never believed we would be without power for very long. We have experienced a few severe storms since moving here and were never without power for more than a few hours so I didn’t have a plan exactly on what to do with the meat in the fridge. Luckily I had everything I needed to make them on the grill using one of my cast iron pans. I also cooked up some baked beans for Chris. In hindsight I should have just cooked the tacos because we weren’t quite able to finish all of it. It all worked out though because we put it in the fridge, moved a pyrex of frozen water from the freezer on top and it was still good the next day.

Dawn of the 2nd Day 120 Hours Remain

The weather was still cool so I spent some time outside trying to clean up the debris left from the storm. I only did a very small section of the dog area and ended up with a HUGE burn pile.

We had leftover tacos for lunch and dinner. You would be amazed at how much time is spent preparing a meal without electricity. I’ve done plenty of dinners on the wood grill over the past year but I’ve never used it as my sole source of cooking. The first 3 days after the storm I wanted to use up all the meat in the freezer, because of this I was cooking for both lunch and dinner. It took up a ridiculous amount of time. Some of this is because a grill doesn’t really hold on to heat. A wood stove or pizza oven would have been easier to use because their mass holds heat and radiates it back out to cook your food. On the grill all I had was the direct heat from the wood and embers.

This was the nightmare homework day. Chris spent most of the day practicing his speech for class. He had to email the outline to his teacher and of course we didn’t have power so we couldn’t do it at home. The library in town was closed even though it was supposed to be open. We called the library in the city, they didn’t pick up so we assumed they were closed. On our way out of town I saw that the local antique store was open. My friend runs it so we stopped in to say hi and see how she weathered the storm. Turns out the shop has a wifi router so she let us use it so he could email in his work.
This might seem like a minor inconvenience but this class is no joke and was a constant source of stress the whole time we were without power. Absolutely no exceptions could be made so that week was a lot of running around.

Dawn of the 3rd Day 96 Hours Remain

My first day alone after the storm. Pretty calm I spent most of the day recharging my batteries. This was husbands first day at work so I skipped cooking lunch. I spent some time trying to clean the house. There is nothing worse than something not being where it should when it’s dark out and you only have flashlight apps and candles to see with!

The rest of the meat in the freezer was thawed by now. I had put it inside a small cooler (with ice) and put the cooler inside the freezer (which was also packed full of frozen food and water). I have no idea if the cooler was really necessary but a package of ground beef and 2 steaks made it 3 days without power so I was pretty happy.

I cooked the steak up for dinner and gave the ground beef to the dogs. There was no way it was going to make it another day so yes I fed a package of organic grass fed beef to my dogs. I know, a little crazy but it was going to go bad anyway and I hate waste!

Husband ended up sleeping at work because he had a bunch of homework left to do and needed to shower there in the morning anyway.

(also the town right up the road)

Dawn of the 4th Day 72 Hours Remain

We borrowed a generator. Nuff said.

Okay not quite enough. We also went out to try to get supplies. Chris had gotten paid so we grabbed a few more nonperishable food stuffs. I also wanted to find a shower bag, candles and a lantern. The only thing we found was the lantern to our great disappointment. You would not believe how empty Walmart was this long after the storm.

Dawn of the 5th Day 28 Hours Remain

We got the generator late the night before so this was the first day I could truly appreciate having it. Sure we didn’t really need it. Everything that could go bad in the fridge already had or was eaten but it was nice to be able to plug in a lamp and being able to easily charge my husband’s cell phone was reason enough.

Around 5pm Chris gets home and there is a crew down the street working on the lines!!! YAY!! Then we left again to try to get supplies, ended up only buying pet food and duck feed. I also finally got a full shower (on base).

Dawn of the 6th Day 24 Hours Remain

Left the house again to shower and refill our water on base. Came home to power glorious power!

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We were not exactly prepared to go 6 days without power. (How we prepared for Irma) Okay that’s not true, we were. We would have survived just fine without purchasing a single thing but it wasn’t as pleasant as it could have been with just a few more items. We probably had enough water but used resources on base to refill the water coolers any time one was empty. We had plenty of food and I was proud of myself for making the decision to start using the meat in the beginning. If I had waited until it became clear the power wasn’t going to be back any time soon we never would have finished it off. The biggest issue was showering and the toilet. We didn’t have enough water to manually fill the toilet tank and keep clean. A shower bag and a composting toilet are high on our purchase soon list. We also want to purchase a generator in the future.

The biggest inconveniences were showering and my husband is currently in ALS, which any military affiliated people may know is a nightmare class designed to torture a service member and their family so that they can promote to staff sergeant. He always has homework which requires electricity and must be printed. You would think boredom would have been the worst part but I stayed pretty busy and in my down time read books instead of wasting time on the internet.

All in all it could have been a lot worse. Even though we had a lot of downed branches there was minimal damage and even after 6 days without power we were still living in relative comfort. We do hope to be more prepared for next time!

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