11+ Days No Power - Finally Got It Back!

[Relentless]

Thanks to all my clients for your patience... Just got power and internet back so I am in the process of cleaning up the mess Sandy made and should be back to full speed shortly. Anyone who needs anything done can contact me via the usual email, icq, skype etc...

11 Days with no power sucks... but overall I have been very fortunate, riding out the storm comfortably and not having lost anyone or anything of real value in the aftermath. I feel terribly for those who have a stranger's boat on their front lawn, their house in the street or a missing loved one.

Hopefully everyone can get things back to as close to normal as possible very quickly.

[BFT3K]

Mine just came on yesterday. 10 fucking cold days!

[MiLo]

Had my bouts with "days without power" so i know how bad it is. Glad you got it back.

[Va2k]

Had a few bad power outage days here in VA. Glad yours is back on, hope everyone that has no power will soon have power..

[Rochard]

Welcome back.

[Tjeezers]

I endured last year 4-5 meters of snow on my house, no power, no internet, no access to roads, just snowed in the house, no water, and running low on food.I only had some flashes of electricity that would last 10-40 minutes. Lasted for almost 3 weeks, after that the spring started, I came out with a beard, lost much kilos and smelled like a bear. But then again, it was not in the city, more wilderness here.

11 days is long to without electricity and internet, but it is a great way to find yourself back and reconsider a few things here and there, move around some stuff and sleep a lot Makes you realize we are all zombies addicted to modern life.

[JFK]

Originally Posted by Tjeezers

I endured last year 4-5 meters of snow on my house, no power, no internet, no access to roads, just snowed in the house, no water, and running low on food.I only had some flashes of electricity that would last 10-40 minutes. Lasted for almost 3 weeks, after that the spring started, I came out with a beard, lost much kilos and smelled like a bear. But then again, it was not in the city, more wilderness here.

11 days is long to without electricity and internet, but it is a great way to find yourself back and reconsider a few things here and there, move around some stuff and sleep a lot Makes you realize we are all zombies addicted to modern life.

Makes you realize we are all zombies addicted to modern life.

How true

[JamesChoopa]

I hear ya! I wasn't out that long, only a few days but the cable/internet in my area took a lot longer to get back online. I'm in Central NJ. Where are you guys located?

[SexKey Scott]

Woot on your power back.. I thought 7 days sucked.. 11? Forget about it!

Not complaining though - tons of people who suffered and still are way worse than just power.

[Roald]

Good to hear you're back!!

[Relentless]

Originally Posted by JamesChoopa

I hear ya! I wasn't out that long, only a few days but the cable/internet in my area took a lot longer to get back online. I'm in Central NJ. Where are you guys located?

Long Island about 40 minutes from Manhattan

[Relentless]

A friend of mine lives a couple blocks from the harbor (never got a drop of flooding at her place in the decades she has lived there). Right now she has a 40' sailboat beached on her front lawn. Nobody knows who owns it, it washed up there somehow during the storm and the water receded without the boat. She called the police and they told her they don't have a protocol in place for how to handle 'someone's boat washed up in my yard', they also said they have so many emergencies that they wont be dealing with the boat for weeks unless it becomes a danger or fire hazard.

So, if you know anyone missing a nice sailboat on the south shore of long island, let me know... I may be able to help them find it haha. ;)

[Double trouble]

Welcome back power

[Relentless]

Originally Posted by Roald

Good to hear you're back!!

Thanks!

[Tom_PM]

My boat! Nah..

Anyway good you're back in the warming glowing warmth of light and power.

[Relentless]

Originally Posted by PR_Tom

My boat! Nah..

[cybermike]

I also got my power back tuesday.. lost it wednesday.. got it back today.

[brassmonkey]

invest in a generator

[cybermike]

Originally Posted by brassmonkey

invest in a generator

Got one last year because of irene.. still a pain in the ass to fuel it up when all the gas stations have no power or 2 hour lines

[John-ACWM]

Good to have the power again

[TurboAngel]

Welcome back!

[Spunky]

Wow,not sure what I'd do without power for that long..

[L-Pink]

Originally Posted by Relentless

Thanks to all my clients for your patience... Just got power and internet back so I am in the process of cleaning up the mess Sandy made and should be back to full speed shortly. Anyone who needs anything done can contact me via the usual email, icq, skype etc...

11 Days with no power sucks... but overall I have been very fortunate, riding out the storm comfortably and not having lost anyone or anything of real value in the aftermath. I feel terribly for those who have a stranger's boat on their front lawn, their house in the street or a missing loved one.

Hopefully everyone can get things back to as close to normal as possible very quickly.

Originally Posted by BFT3K

Mine just came on yesterday. 10 fucking cold days!

Glad you guys are ok with just inconveniences and not some type of tragedy.

.

[L-Pink]

Originally Posted by Fungus

Had a few bad power outage days here in VA. Glad yours is back on, hope everyone that has no power will soon have power..

Were are you, Northern Va? I lived in Burke/Springfield for a few years.


.

[TurboAngel]

Are thing getting back to normal? The news here in NC isn't showing much about it now.

[Relentless]

Still 14,000 people on Long Island with no power, NOT including people displaced by flood waters etc...
The power company LIPA is certain to have their license yanked and some heavy fines imposed.
Most people are finally back to work but a lot of infrastructure is destroyed and power is run on alternative channels.
One big storm and the whole area could go dark again...

[Juicy D. Links]

Originally Posted by Relentless

Still 14,000 people on Long Island with no power, NOT including people displaced by flood waters etc...
The power company LIPA is certain to have their license yanked and some heavy fines imposed.
Most people are finally back to work but a lot of infrastructure is destroyed and power is run on alternative channels.
One big storm and the whole area could go dark again...

I got it back on Sat .........

[PR_Glen]

Originally Posted by Relentless

A friend of mine lives a couple blocks from the harbor (never got a drop of flooding at her place in the decades she has lived there). Right now she has a 40' sailboat beached on her front lawn. Nobody knows who owns it, it washed up there somehow during the storm and the water receded without the boat. She called the police and they told her they don't have a protocol in place for how to handle 'someone's boat washed up in my yard', they also said they have so many emergencies that they wont be dealing with the boat for weeks unless it becomes a danger or fire hazard.

So, if you know anyone missing a nice sailboat on the south shore of long island, let me know... I may be able to help them find it haha. ;)

uhh yeah that is my boat.. can they ship it to lake st. claire for me? thanks ;)


Tjeezers, where do you live that gets that much snow??? I have friends in Alberta not getting that much, that is crazy..

[V_RocKs]

And here I thought going 3 days without the Internet was grueling torture during vacations...

[Special Ed]

Man...my heart goes out to all your guys. Glad you're back. Don't know what I would do without power that long! We do have a back up natural gas generator though.

Not sure it would work if our house was floating down the street!

[cybermike]

Its so easy to forget about everyone else without power when you get back yours and get back to your usual routines. When things calm down gotta find an electrician to put in a box so we could hook up our generator directly into the house so we can get the heat and boiler working next time.

[DWB]

11 days is a long time. Good to hear you're settled now.

Please list the top 5 things you NEEDED or ran out of the quickest once power was lost and the storm ended. Can be little things like matches or the obvious like water.

[Relentless]

Originally Posted by Special "Ed"

Man...my heart goes out to all your guys. Glad you're back. Don't know what I would do without power that long! We do have a back up natural gas generator though. Not sure it would work if our house was floating down the street!

A lot of people here had gas generators and no gasoline to run them when the shortages hit. I may add a natural gas generator to my house, but with my storm luck a tree will likely fall on it

[Relentless]

Originally Posted by DWB

Please list the top 5 things you NEEDED or ran out of the quickest once power was lost and the storm ended. Can be little things like matches or the obvious like water.

The 8 things you MUST have:

Flashlights - Preferably with LED lights which last many hours longer than conventional incandescent bulbs.

Batteries - Stock the standard sizes and also check anything you actually need to get a spare odd size battery to fit it.

Radio - Get a REAL radio, an actual radio with an antenna and battery. Everyone has internet radio and iphones etc etc which don't help if the cell towers are all down. You need an actual radio like your grandfather used to carry in his pocket. One with a crank (usually sold for hunting trips) is a great idea.

Water - We had a real scare here that the main water pumps for our entire area were close to shutting down. Some areas had sewage treatment plants go offline and could not drink their tap water. If you don't have water, everything else is secondary. Keep a couple full water-cooler bottles in your garage just in case.

Gas Can - If you hire landscapers and pay people to do all that kind of work as I do, you may not own a gas can. When you need gas, you need something to put it in and they sell out immediately.

Local Friends - As webmasters many of us have friends all over the world. That is not helpful when your area goes dark. The entire ordeal was made much easier by the simple fact that I have plenty of friends locally. We were able to stay with friends just outside the affected area in Connecticut, come back closer to home and stay with other friends when their power was restored days prior to my own, arrange places for other people to stay when they had no heat. When the power goes out for two weeks, you find out who your friends are very quickly.

Sense Of Humor - Yes I am very serious about it. When things like this happen, some people panic and become the biggest assholes on the planet. It really isn't helpful. People got into fistfights at gas stations waiting to fill up, people stole generators from neighboring houses, those people had an awful time as a result. Be able to laugh about it, be able to make someone else laugh about it. Not insane clown funny... but normal stable person we will get through this 'Hawkeye from MASH' funny. It helps more than you might imagine.

Gun - Again, very serious. There were incidents of looting, threats that the water supply might become unstable, etc etc... All the things that make owning a gun make sense. You don't need an arsenal of 50 guns and a rocket launcher.... you don't need landmines. But having a gun and a few extra rounds of ammo makes the time pass much more calmly.

I am not a 'prepper' and never will be. The people who had a basement full of canned soup suffered just as much as the people who did not. However, having a few simple things in a closet for the occasion definitely made it much easier... and nothing mattered more than being able to get along with friends and neighbors in the community at a time when going it alone would have been infinitely more challenging.

[CDSmith]

If that ever happened here in say, midwinter for that long, I'd be pretty much hooped. I'd have to chop a hole in a wall and build a makeshift fireplace or something. :D

11 days with no electricity is unheard of here though. Manitoba is a major hydro-electricity producer, we sell to the US and neighboring provinces and have generating stations (dams) on all our major rivers, and the company has an army of technicians that would be all over any kind of outtage problem no matter what time of year it was.

In the last 20 years I think the power here has gone out once for maybe an hour, that's it. (Knock on my head)

[CDSmith]

Originally Posted by Relentless

The 8 things you MUST have:

Flashlights - Preferably with LED lights which last many hours longer than conventional incandescent bulbs.

Batteries - Stock the standard sizes and also check anything you actually need to get a spare odd size battery to fit it.

Radio - Get a REAL radio, an actual radio with an antenna and battery. Everyone has internet radio and iphones etc etc which don't help if the cell towers are all down. You need an actual radio like your grandfather used to carry in his pocket. One with a crank (usually sold for hunting trips) is a great idea.

Water - We had a real scare here that the main water pumps for our entire area were close to shutting down. Some areas had sewage treatment plants go offline and could not drink their tap water. If you don't have water, everything else is secondary. Keep a couple full water-cooler bottles in your garage just in case.

Gas Can - If you hire landscapers and pay people to do all that kind of work as I do, you may not own a gas can. When you need gas, you need something to put it in and they sell out immediately.

Local Friends - As webmasters many of us have friends all over the world. That is not helpful when your area goes dark. The entire ordeal was made much easier by the simple fact that I have plenty of friends locally. We were able to stay with friends just outside the affected area in Connecticut, come back closer to home and stay with other friends when their power was restored days prior to my own, arrange places for other people to stay when they had no heat. When the power goes out for two weeks, you find out who your friends are very quickly.

Sense Of Humor - Yes I am very serious about it. When things like this happen, some people panic and become the biggest assholes on the planet. It really isn't helpful. People got into fistfights at gas stations waiting to fill up, people stole generators from neighboring houses, those people had an awful time as a result. Be able to laugh about it, be able to make someone else laugh about it. Not insane clown funny... but normal stable person we will get through this 'Hawkeye from MASH' funny. It helps more than you might imagine.

Gun - Again, very serious. There were incidents of looting, threats that the water supply might become unstable, etc etc... All the things that make owning a gun make sense. You don't need an arsenal of 50 guns and a rocket launcher.... you don't need landmines. But having a gun and a few extra rounds of ammo makes the time pass much more calmly.

I am not a 'prepper' and never will be. The people who had a basement full of canned soup suffered just as much as the people who did not. However, having a few simple things in a closet for the occasion definitely made it much easier... and nothing mattered more than being able to get along with friends and neighbors in the community at a time when going it alone would have been infinitely more challenging.

All of that makes perfect sense.


(Except to the anti-gun radicals on this board of course)

[RyuLion]

Originally Posted by jfk

how true

+1 <----------------

[Tat2Jr]

You never realize how good you have it until you hear about these disasters. Glad you got your power back finally. Hope everything else falls in to place quickly for everyone else.

[alex.missyouth]

11 days is crazy, I can't believe it takes that much for a 'developed' country to solve that problem.

[Relentless]

Originally Posted by CDSmith

All of that makes perfect sense.

For a few days... or for a week in reasonable temperatures it works. For 2 weeks or for a week in bitter cold, the ONLY things on that list that help are friends and a sense of humor. The rest all becomes decreasing in importance.

[cybermike]

Relentless were you in the flood zone? I'm like 3 miles south of sunrise highway and man it sure did flood and most of my neighbors stayed that night.. But we got very lucky and it didn't get into the house.