The Survival Guide › Power Cuts and Grid-Down
🔌Power Cuts and Grid-Down
A long outage is not one problem. It is heat or cold, water, food, medication and information failing together.
What actually kills people. Almost nobody is killed by the absence of electricity. They are killed by what gets used to replace it — generators and stoves brought indoors — and by the loss of heating, cooling and powered medical equipment.
Before
- Write down what in your household actually needs power: oxygen concentrator, CPAP, refrigerated insulin, a stairlift. Plan for each one specifically.
- Keep a battery or crank radio. When the mobile network goes, broadcast radio is usually still there.
- Store water: mains pressure often depends on electric pumps.
- Keep some cash. Card terminals and ATMs go down with the grid.
- Fit carbon monoxide alarms, and put a thermometer in the fridge and the freezer.
During
- Generators outdoors only, twenty feet from the building, exhaust pointed away from windows, doors and vents.
- Keep the fridge and freezer shut. Roughly four hours in a closed fridge, about forty-eight in a full freezer and half that in a half-empty one.
- Never use a barbecue, camping stove or gas oven for indoor heat.
- Unplug electronics so the surge on restoration does not take them out.
- Gather the household into one room and heat or cool that, rather than the whole house.
After
- When in doubt, throw it out. Food that has been above 40°F for more than two hours is not worth the risk, and it will not smell wrong.
- Restart appliances a few at a time.
- Restock whatever you used before the next one.
- Note what actually ran out. It is rarely what people expect — usually it is cash, batteries and patience.
The thing people get wrong
“The generator is fine in the garage with the door open.”
This is the single most lethal misconception in this entire guide. Carbon monoxide is colourless and odourless, it builds up faster than an open door clears it, and it can linger for hours after the engine stops. It kills nearly a hundred people a year in the United States from portable generators alone. Outdoors, twenty feet, exhaust pointed away. There is no safe indoor version of this.
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The rest of the guide
Sources: National Weather Service, FEMA, CDC and CPSC. Informational only, and no substitute for what your local emergency services tell you on the day — when officials say go, go.