Most people have laughed at us for stockpiling food and emergency supplies as I have said in an earlier post. They didn't see the point of it, and thought we were some kind of nutcase survivalists. Well.....we proved 'em wrong by showing our point over the last 3 days.
Sunday night around 8pm we had an awful windstorm blow through. Tree's went down everywhere, and my poor canopy shed (see photo) pulled out of the ground and flipped end over end into my garage, twisting it like a pretzel. A large limb on an apple tree fell behind it, luckily missing my rabbit hutches by 3 feet. Of course, a HUGE tree came down across the street, taking a pole and power lines with it.......*poof*, no electricity. I heard the crash and ran out to make sure it wasn't car, and saw that it wasnt, only to be amazed by MIMV's (morons in motor vehicles) lol.
The tree covered nearly 2 lanes, and the pole about 3/4 of 1 lane, yet cars kept coming. One even hit his brakes, slid THROUGH the tree, hit the pole, and kept going....amazing. Cars were stopped, trying to figure out what to do, so there I was, standing in 50 mph winds directing traffic with a flashlight. A few neighbors came to help, and we had people turn in the field; drive across to my driveway, and back out the way they came. Some were ok, others were scared, and some were just downright A-holes. One lady bitched that I was out there and not the police. I told here they were on the way, and still she bitched. I told her to just sit there if she wanted to complain, and wait to see if another tree came down on top of her car.....she promptly left when my voice got louder than the wind LOL. 10-12 cars stopped in the middle of the road, yet the idiots kept coming and trying to pass on the right, only to meet up with mr tree. I saw 3 or 4 drive through and over the power lines, and one total jackass drove his lifted 4wd OVER THE POLE and drove off. Remember an old post of mine about stupidity? Well I saw a lot of em Sunday night. Help came via one lone township officer, yelling for us to get inside. I tried to tell Sgt Attitude what we were doing and to keep diverting them through the field, and he just yelled, "go inside!"....fine jackass, all yours. By the time I got inside, Lisa had the house pretty well lit up with oil lamps and candles. I was a bit cold from standing in the wind and light rain and wanted coffee. I grabbed a railroad lantern and walked to the garage, returning with a coleman stove and one of my perculators. Light......hot coffee.....life is good! lol.
Monday morning I got up and realized I couldn't get out of the driveway, so I took a vacation day from work. I fed the chickens & rabbits, backed the Lowboy down to the garage, and tossed the generator in the trailer. I got it to the house, fired it up, and had power to the fridge and freezer in minutes. YAY. 20 gallons of water in the basement, plus another 100 outside in rain barrels, plenty of firewood, coleman fuel, propane, and 2 pantries full of food, we're set for this!
Most neighbors bugged out, some of us didn't. Rick, behind me, fired up his generator as well and was fine other than borrowing an oil lamp. Others were at the street every couple hours whining about nothing being done. C'mon folks, buckle up, you can live without the tv and microwave for a while lol.
Still no power or acess out Tuesday morning, so I took another vacation day. I cleaned up the twisted canopy shed and other trash that had blown in, and just basically relaxed and read. I ran the generator in 2 hour shifts, 2 on, 2 off, to keep the food from spoiling but save gas. We made breakfast and lunch on the coleman stove as we did Monday, no problem. Our power came back on about 2:00 but the rest behind me were still wihout power till around 8. Apparantly I'm on a different loop, and the same as the elementary school, so we were priority. Oddly enough, I was kind of dissapointed to see it come back on after 2 days, I was enjoying it. We were doing just fine....why? We were prepared. No one else was, we were.
I hope maybe some of the people around me learned from this. Maybe they realized I'm not crazy. We only lost 2 days of electricity, but we could have gone for weeks without worries. Those who laughed at us before were the same ones who bugged out or asked to borrow supplies. I told em how/what we stocked up on, and where to get things like oil lamps and other emergency supplies. Lets just see what happens next time..........
Chris
