Day 2. We lost our electricity at around 4:30pm 01/27, along with the rest of the county. There are countless power lines and trees down. Cell phones are completely useless, the towers are down. This morning we woke up to very low water pressure, so I started filling everything up with what water we had. We ended up filling up everything we could find. Also filled up our 55gal drum that we don't have a cap for just in case. That's mainly for toilet flushes because we haven't cleaned it properly. We are running our home on our generator right now. It's expensive but we're staying warm and have lights. We have a 5000watt generator and we're running all our lights (CFL's) my laptop, the router/modem, deep freeze, 1 of our refrigerators, 1 television and 1 satellite box. We have a natural gas hot water heater, stove and furnace, so all we need to run our heat is power to turn the blower. All in all we're doing fine, but gas is important when running the generator all day. We go through about 10 gal a day to keep it on from wake up to sleep. We keep it off at night and run the gas logs. Honestly we could be conserving a lot more energy but we're housing my great grandmother, grandmother and an aunt. I got the chainsaw out today and cut up the huge limb in the front yard, I'm going to split it all and let it season out.
Funny thing is that now my parent's understand why I stayed on their asses for getting prepared. They now wish that they has listened to be earlier. Even if this isn't the end of the world, it's still a disaster and there are many who are sitting in their homes cold and in the dark due to lack of prepping.
The water pressure came back at the end of the day but that could be temporary. I work an at-home online job so I won't be able to work until the power and telephones are back to working. All my classes are online so there won't be any classwork or homework being done.
It's sad how we're all so dependent on someone else to provide us with practically everything. I will not post all the pictures I took today, but I uploaded them all to my Photobucket account and if anyone would like to view them feel free to take a peak.
