Our little adventure

As you may or may not have heard, San Diego experienced a major power outage yesterday/today. I was at home studying when suddenly my internet connection dropped and my computer told me the battery was almost dead (my battery lasts about a minute without a plug).  I was about to call our management to tell them to come fix it when Eric called and informed me that it was not just me.  In fact, at the peak, about 5 million people were without power.  For us it lasted about 12 hours.

Eric and I quickly found out how unprepared we were for this.  Both of our phones were about dead with no way of charging them.  And with that, reception for phones that were working was spotty at best.  The next few hours were quite stressful with me worrying about Eric getting home.  He was at work with horrible traffic between him and home.  He rides a carpool to the university campus and then a shuttle home.  Which, for some reason, decided that no electricity was enough of a reason to cancel all the buses.  So he was stranded a half hour drive away at campus.  Our phones somehow held out long enough, and for about a minute reception came back, so he could tell me he was stuck and I could tell him I was coming.  About 9pm, we were home.

How small a thing, yet so depended on, is the ability to connect and communicate with each other.  Obviously this was just a power outage, not a huge disaster.  But I was so worried about the fact that I couldn't talk to Eric, couldn't know where he was.  Had he been in an accident?  Why wasn't he home by now?  Where is he now?  I was a mess.  I couldn't concentrate on trying to study, so I cleaned the apartment to distract myself until it was too dark to see.  I can only imagine how it would be in a real disaster like an earthquake.  If I wasn't able to talk to Eric, to know he was okay, that would be horrible.  We were told in an emergency preparedness class recently that cell phones would still be able to work in a disaster situation and that you would at least be able to send texts or call out of state.  We found that wasn't the case.  Our texts weren't sending, no calls going out. The reception just died.

So Eric and I learned a few things:
1. Charge our phones every day
2. Get a radio (apparantly some places were put on a boil water advisory and we would have had no idea)
3. Sign our phones up for the reverse 911 message system that the city has (of course, this would only be useful if our phones weren't dead)
4. Get more/better flashlights
5. Get more candles (we had enough and made do but they wouldn't have lasted us too long)
6. When we have more space, store more ice/cold packs in the freezer (to keep refrigerated food good. We had just a couple ice packs that we put in a large cooler with our milk etc, which was fine for overnight but would not have lasted much longer)

One of our goals for the last year since we moved here is to finally get moving on our own family emergency preparedness.  Things like lack of time and resources have continued to put that on hold.  But I think this was a nice little shake to tell us we need to get moving.  It never hurts to be prepared, it can only help.

Besides the wake-up call, at least one other good thing came of all this - our apartment is really clean.