Thirteen Hours without Power
We survived a major windstorm and learned we need to be better prepared for blackouts
A major storm hit a large portion of Norway over the weekend causing wind damage, flooding, and blackouts across the country. While our area was lucky enough to avoid the rain and flooding, we did get hit with powerful winds which caused some damage and power outages across the region. Meteorologists warned it could be the strongest storm to hit Norway in 25 years.
The wind started Friday evening and kept us up most of the night. We are no strangers to strong winds here on the Fosen Peninsula, but we are in a new house where we had not experienced a wind storm just yet. We were unsure how the house would hold up. We got out of bed Saturday morning to one tree down in the woods of our side yard and another appearing to be uprooted in the wind. That one never fell thank goodness. A small part of our turf roof was also blown off, but it’s in an area that catches a lot of wind regularly and is fake grass. It just needed to be nailed back down after the storm.
The strong winds lasted throughout all of Saturday, decreasing strength towards the evening hours, but were still a little stronger on Sunday. According to my weather app, the wind speeds held strong around 60 to 70 mph for most of Saturday with gusts above 100 mph at times. I did see that some areas reached wind speed gusts well above the 100+ mph mark. Our windows were shaking and rattling. At times I was nervous they were going to bust, but that was probably me being a bit dramatic.
After breakfast Saturday morning our power went out for an hour or two. We were happy we got the chance to eat and make some coffee, but it continued to be spotty for a few hours until it shut off again around 2pm. It was then out for what ended up being a total of 13 hours. A power outage with a two-year-old at home was a new challenge for both my husband and me.
We were having a lazy Saturday since the winds were strong and going outside seemed a bit dangerous, which meant we were watching movies and having dance parties. Both activities ended when the electricity went out. Our son did not understand the concept of not having power to turn the electronics back on. It took some time to get him to understand, TV and music were no longer options. He started to go a bit stir-crazy.
Lucky for us, the outage started around the same time we put him down for a nap, so a couple of hours were spent with him sleeping and us reading our books. It was quite nice. Then he woke up and we had to figure out snack time, dinner time, and entertainment.
This is when we learned we were a bit underprepared. A perk of our new rental home is the gas range, which meant we could cook some macaroni and cheese for dinner. We were nervous to open our refrigerator too much for fear it would lose temperature too quickly, so it was mac and cheese with a banana for dinner. The rest of our dried goods were mostly cookies, crackers, and marshmallows, which we snacked on most of the night.
As luck would have it, I had gone shopping Friday afternoon and picked up a 30 pack of tea candles. Otherwise, we would have had our headlamps, a couple of scented candles, and two or three tea candles as our light source for the night. As the sun set we decided to spend the evening in the living room where we lit as many candles as we safely could. We had to constantly remind our toddler not to blow them out. We spent the evening wrestling, finding ways to make each other giggle, readings, and taking spooky pictures in the candlelight. It ended up being a fun enough night.
We learned we need to better prepare our house for power outages, especially as winter approaches. We ended up having to throw out a lot of our refrigerator foods, which maybe can’t be helped too much, but if we would have had more ice packs and bags of ice on hand, we could’ve utilized our Yeti coolers to keep these foods safe for a longer period of time.
We need to have more non-perishable food options on hand. There isn’t a wide variety of canned food options at the grocery stores in town, but the sporting goods stores do have plenty of dried meal options available. These would have been ideal to have on hand. I should also pay attention to the non-perishable snack options I stock our pantry with as well, so that we have more options than cookies and treats if we find ourselves in this situation again.
Both my husband and I had to sit in the car for a while to charge our cell phones at some point during the evening. Having a portable charger, charged and ready to go, to power our devices would have been a better option. Also having more battery powered, and maybe chargeable, lights on hand would be a good idea as well. Candles are fun and create a nice atmosphere, but having a fire source at toddler height isn’t ideal.
For the winter months, we do have heating options on hand. Under our deck is stocked with plenty of firewood, and we have plenty of extra blankets and warm clothing. Having a battery powered heater may be a good idea as well, and making sure we always have extra bottles of water is important too.
I’m happy to report we survived our first extended power outage, and we learned something along the way too. We will be better prepared for these outages in the future with a few minor updates to our “preparedness kit” at home. I encourage you to take inventory on your preparedness kit and update as necessary.
The calm after the storm Sunday
