Plenty of people are hurting, in SE Texas, without power. It seems to be a minor miracle that we still have electric power, as we are in a mid-Fifties bungalow, which is poorly insulated. Most people that we are texting are without electric power. It is tempting to try to drive to my mother’s place, and bring her here, but we could lose power, making the hazardous 60-mile round trip a wasted effort.
We had preemptively gotten a hotel room, located nearer a power sub-station, to serve as a “lifeboat,” which is something we started doing with predicted flood events, several years ago, but, alas, that hotel lost power last night, and though it is a modern building, and so nicely insulated, sooner or later, cold is cold. My wife is at the hotel, but may end up coming back to the house.
To be clear, I about not cry-baby-ing. We are in no physical danger. This is nothing, compared to Hurricanes Ike or Harvey. We have adequate supplies, adequate warm clothing, and adequate sleeping bags. We do not have a hard-wired, whole-house-capable generator, but have two Honda generators, that we can fire-up, if needed. We have solar “generators” that have substantial storage, and, the sun is now shining. We have power supplies for recharging phones and tablets, making the generators unnecessary, unless power remains off-line for days. We are retired, and have nowhere that we “need to be.” I have commuted through worse, when I had to drive from near my mother’s present location, into my police duty station, which is not far from where we now live. My chief concern, in this old house, is a dead-end pipe, that leads to a capped-off terminal end, so, it could freeze, if power fails, long enough, and not make its status known, until it thaws. I have the tools and supplies to to quickly cut-away, and/or cap-it off, if necessary.