So thanks to a certain individual whose actions were either incredibly selfish or incredibly clueless (¿por que no los dos?), we returned from Disneyland to have my wife sick on Saturday and test positive for Covid on Sunday for the first time in the three years of t he pandemic. At that point, it was more or less inevitable that I would test positive as well, which I did on Tuesday…four hours after our house lost power due to wind. That’s right, high winds under a clear and sunny sky knocked our neighborhood completely off the grid along with 275,000 of our closest friends up and down the Peninsula.
We were down for a little over 48 hours, which frankly would have been a doddle if it hadn’t been for Covid. Alternately, a C19 positive test would be okay if you could just collapse on the couch and watch BritBox for a couple of days while ordering DoorDash. Instead, we were faced with the conundrum of “you have no electricity and you can’t be around people.” Which made things exceptionally tricky, as within a few hours, the cellular coverage at the house ceased to function altogether, only coming back sporadically in the middle of the night.
So in the grand scheme of things, this was a very good test of our 72 Hours readiness, and in the wake of having mucked out the fridge and plugged everything back in, these are my preliminary conclusions:
* We had gas and water uninterrupted throughout. If we had not had gas, we would have been cooking on the side burner of the new Weber grill – but at any given time we have four propane tanks in various states of readiness, so that probably could have held for a day or three.
* Water…well, we need to have more in stock than we have. It was nice to be able to shower, but that could be foregone in a pinch. As for the bathroom…well, that’s why they call it pea gravel, isn’t it? We probably could stand to have an Apocalypse Bucket in case of trafficking with Duce Staley. Speaking of which:
* The next town over was mostly OK, and we were able to drive over there to get cell signal and certain extra provisions. I would not count on that when the Big One comes. The flip side is that after The Big One we probably will not be obligated to report straight to work for a few days. The absence of internet access is going to be tougher to work around, because unless one has a Starlink system or similar, it’s a big ask to find a connection.
* As for things that take power, we have enough flashlights and cellphone battery packs to easily get through three days even before recharging things in one of the cars. It would be even nicer to have two-way charging in the ID.4, but that was a model year too late for us. As it is, we had the loan of a Jackery battery pack with a couple of solar panels, and that might provide enough power for rudimentary use of my wife’s CPAP and maybe to charge a laptop in a pinch as long as you have all day to move the solar panels for recharging. We’ll look into that. Without an actual generator, the refrigerator is probably toast anyway – but the freezer compartment of the kitchen fridge and the chest freezer in the garage both came through with flying colors. The rickety old beer fridge, less so – but we probably shouldn’t have had that much in its freezer as it is. (The beer is fine, as far as I can tell.)
* While power is back up, the AT&T internet access is not, nor is there a timetable for its return. We can tether off our phones for now, but that’s not a long term solution especially given the limits of our cell coverage, and while we could always drive to Starbucks, that is no more an option in an actual Big One than going into Starbucks with Covid and just camping out for two hours.
* In the finest traditions of the University of California Marching Band, I dare say we managed to adapt and perform.