Saturday, September 01, 2007

Where were you when the lights went out?

For those of you who don't live in the great state of HOT, you may not know that we had a power outage after a severe thunderstorm. We were sitting around having a nice meal, celebrating JVA b'day and our other J who also had a b'day. The wind started, followed by thunder and lighting and then massive amounts of rain. We watched our tree in the backyard touch the ground because of the strength of the storm. Then the power flashed off once and then again, this time it did not come back on.

We thought that it would be on again before too long and so we pulled out the lanterns and watched the storm. When the rain quit our road was like a river. Everyone went home and abe went to the church for a few minutes. When he got home we went for a drive to see how far the power outage extended. Most of town was dark, but there were a few lights in various places. We went home and opened our bedroom windows and then went to bed. We hoped that the power would return soon. At six thirty AM my phone rang. It was one of my teachers telling me that school was canceled. We had a meeting scheduled with some business & industry people that afternoon- we decided that that wasn't happening. I got up and went to school to find out what was going on.

Abe had therapy and then a doctor appt, so we went to the valley. We also went to a movie and returned home to a dark house. We spent the night with our niece - thank you hairball. All of our children were without power also, so they had to find other placed to be. Hairball and her brother had powereven though we all live in the same town. G'ma also had no power so she spent the day and night with hairball.

Friday AM and still no power. We went home and changed clothes and decided to drive up the mountain to get out of the heat. It was almost 4 PM before our power was restored.

We have gone over this a few times in our mind - what could we have been more prepared with? We had a generator that we borrowed, so our freezer and frig were okay. We could have slept at our house and we had enough water and food. Our phone worked, but not everyone has our cell phone numbers. This was a great preparedness exercise. Our bishop has been asking us to see how prepared we are. We decided that next time we just hope it isn't quite this hot. But I guess that is part of an emergency - it has nothing to do with convenience. We kept thinking that our power would come back on and everything would be back to normal.

We are all back home, no worse for the wear.

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