I watched Anderson Live today and had a good laugh when I saw 3 people in his audience. 3!! No less, no more. Good on Anderson for doing the show and updating everyone on the situation with Hurricane Sandy. The show had more of the look of a news show than a talk show with the usual reporters blowing away in the storm while trying to update us with the latest wave height and wind strength. I honestly hope that there are no fatalities from people staying behind.
It got me thinking about what we do here to prepare for a possible blackout in an upcoming storm. In other words, when we have a warning and time to get ready. We often have blackouts that occur any time throughtout the year. No need to wait for winter!
I usually stay away from writing lists myself although I love reading them because a). I figure that everyone else writes great lists that pretty much cover it all and b). I'm pretty sure that my lists would be incomplete and I'd always want to add to it but oh well, here goes.
1. We have lots of wood cut.
Well, that only applies to 3 seasons but it's pretty important during those 3, expecially winter when it's life and death. It's quite amazing how much wood we can go through in a season. Last year when we filled our front porch for the first time, I was sure it was plenty for the year. DH wasn't so sure and he was right. We filled it completely again and that just got us through.
Have the wood close by. Sounds obvious but don't most emergency things...after the emergency happens?! The first stop for our wood, of course, is the bush where it's cut. It then gets piled along a fence out behind the barn in order to dry for the summer so we can enjoy our front porch. If the wood is still out behind the barn or still standing in the bush, it isn't much good during a storm.
Bring extra wood inside. I have a problem with this and don't really like doing it. The first year in our 2nd farmhouse we did this. We brought the wood into our basement for our wood furnace and then brought it upstairs for our wood stove. I sat one day with the wood stove door open (it was not glass) to watch the fire and to warm up. As I watched, hundreds of large, black ants crawled out of the burning wood and all over it, trying to escape. Of course they could not.
The next summer, we noticed thousands of small bugs covering the wood that was still outside. They turned out to be earwigs that we were bringing into the house unaware. No wonder we had an infestation of ants and earwigs.
For this reason, I'm not very keen to store any more wood in the house than necessary, unless there's an upcoming storm called for.
Need to change---I'd love to exchange this wood stove for a new one. This stove was in this house when we moved in 2.5 years ago and already installed so it made sense to leave it, especially since it had the glass window that our other 2 stoves did not have and that I was hoping for. It also does a fabulous job of heating the entire house. The only problem is that it does not work well for cooking on top, something that would be important in a power outage, expecially a prolonged outage. The top is 2 levels and most pots and frying pans don't fit on either level. The kettle that is filled with water and is sitting on top of the stove for humidifying the air does not ever boil so there doesn't seem to be enough heat to actually cook food. Our other wood stove boiled the food so I'm thinking that this would be a better option.
We need to replace the stove pipe that rises above the roof. We live on a very windy (the highest spot in this area for miles around) and very exposed farm (lots of trees but very few around the house for protection). The wind not only whips around the buildings but occasionally down the stove pipe and blows the smoke out into the house. We're hoping that a higher pipe on the roof would help with this problem.
Matches!!! Lots and lots of matches. They're something we just always have around and that makes it easy to not notice when they are low in number as we assume that there's always more somewhere. If not matches then something to light the fire.
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