Paul Martin, a much more serious prepper than I, has an after action report on what went right and wrong in his own disaster preparations. Following winterization checklists and having good gear on hand were among the successes. On the other side of the ledger:
I need a better cold weather management plan for the tankless water heaters. This was our weakest point in our house. The drain lines would freeze up, requiring me to go out at all hours with a heat gun to thaw them out to get them back on line and to prevent damage. I was up between 3AM and 4 AM on the coldest nights, outside in the elements (temps between 10 to 15 degrees), working on them. Not fun. I should have started working the checklist items sooner than I did. My original strategy was to do a few items on the list every night until the big event on Sunday night/Monday morning, when the snow fell and the temps really dropped. The problem came when the first ice storm on Thursday night/Friday morning took out a bunch of limbs around the house, requiring me to spend several hours cleaning that up instead of preparing for the bigger storm that was coming. Hindsight being 20/20, I should have burned a day of PTO and just done everything in the milder temps and when there was still food and ample supplies at the stores. I should have cleaned out my gutters before the storm started. That’s going on the checklist. Leaves from the winds filled the gutters in the first storm, which then got backed up with rain, which in turn froze in place. Not good. Cleaner gutters drain quicker and collect less ice.
Plus some sobering thoughts:
You’ve now seen our grid under stress. Cold snaps in 2011, 2018 and the worst cold on record in 2021, along with the boil water order of 2018, provide real world examples of what the local grid will do when it’s stressed. You are now on notice of the grid’s limitations. What if the next emergency isn’t in the cold, but in the 105 degree heat of a Texas summer? And what if the power is off for a week or more? What if the failure is caused by a cyber attack which not only shuts off the power but causes physical damage to the grid? By the way, don’t think this can’t happen:
Texas’ power grid was “seconds and minutes” away from a catastrophic failure that could have left Texans in the dark for months, officials with the entity that operates the grid said Thursday.
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While generators rapidly dropped off the grid as the weather worsened, operators monitored the difference between the supply of power on the grid and the demand for that power. As supply dwindled and demand grew, the margin narrowed to more and more dangerous levels, forcing grid operators to enact emergency protocols to either increase supply or decrease demand.
The worst case scenario: Demand for power outstrips the supply of power generation available on the grid, causing equipment to catch fire, substations to blow and power lines to go down.
If the grid had gone totally offline, the physical damage to power infrastructure from overwhelming the grid could have taken months to repair, said Bernadette Johnson, senior vice president of power and renewables at Enverus, an oil and gas software and information company headquartered in Austin.
Things could have been much worse. They could be much worse in a future outage. Is your family ready for that? If your family isn’t ready, you will then be relying upon not only the grid operators but also your local elected officials to provide you with answers and solutions. Some of you may not be very keen on doing so after all of this.
And that’s where much of our community’s struggle lies. As a community, we need to make sure that while we’re holding our government accountable that we’re also holding ourselves accountable. I get it: not everyone can afford to have a whole house generator. But a lot of people can afford less expensive options that would have made their lives a lot more comfortable and safer.
Hence my cheap prepper supply list.
I plead with you: make preparedness a priority for your family. If it means you have to take a smaller vacation or put off buying a nicer car for a year or so, do it. Many people can implement the step by step preparedness plan I have created in the Ready Citizen Manual which is absolutely free, which will quickly get you to a base line level of readiness enabling you to handle what we just went through.
I don’t see things getting easier in the days ahead. Our economy is showing worrisome signs, our communities are still seething from the last election with no sign of abatement, our grids are vulnerable, and we’re still dealing with a pandemic for the foreseeable future. We now see how uncomfortable things can get. Take steps now to protect yourself and family from enduring that again.
I’m in Montana where we weren’t inconvenienced a bit by temps below zero for eight straight days. However, I watched what happened in Texas and took a few lessons. We have two backup sources of heat and have rigged our furnace blower to be able to run off of a generator if we lose power. We decided we needed a third heat source, just in case. (We already have three alternative ways to cook food.) We have also added Hothands lap warmers to our vehicle kits. Just a little something to boost the down blankets we always keep in the cars. Hopefully, it’s all a waste of money but if it isn’t….