Just yesterday, our power was restored after a four day outage caused by a combination of snow, ice and wind. At the peak of the outage, almost 300,000 people were without power in Western Washington. Some of these people were in cities and some were in rural areas. Many were without power for three or four days--some even longer.
My family was able to relax and enjoy the outage because we were prepared. We had a generator. We had water. We had food. We have a fireplace and firewood. We had flashlights and rechargable batteries. We had board games. Do you know what else we had? Fun.
As I kept tabs on the outage updates from Puget Sound Energy, I noticed a disturbing trend. People were angry and bitter at their inconvenient and -- in some cases -- dangerous situations. Most of these people blamed the utility for their misery and lack of power. Some of them had little children. Some of them had elderly relatives that required oxygen and other medical devices.
I couldn't help but wonder why these people weren't more prepared. All of them expected PSE to be more prepared to tackle the disaster, but when a utility has hundreds of thousands of people to take care of the only person you can count on to put your needs first is you. Certainly, the company did all that it could -- but most people still went days without power.
This personal experience prompted the creation of this blog. It is my hope that, by reading it, you will become more prepared to handle any personal emergency that comes your way. Power outages often accompany other emergency situations, such as earthquakes and storms.
Too often, people only understand the importance of preparation after the power is already out. Don't make that mistake. Prepare today -- because when the power's out, it's already too late.
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