Three Days Without Power

As if recent flooding wasn't enough, Mother Nature decided to throw another big storm our way, this time with high winds in addition to the rain. The storm came in on Thursday, and we had repeated brown-outs for about an hour before we lost power altogether at 9:30pm. So, we brought out the candles, oil lamps and flashlights and read for a few hours before setting the kitchen timer as an alarm clock and heading to bed.

The next morning the power was still out, but there was still enough hot water for both of us to have hot showers. While our heating system is propane-based, even the propane furnace requires electricity for the igniter, so heat was out. Thankfully the house is pretty well insulated and the outdoor temperature was fairly warm (30s), so the house temperature was still in the lower 60s in the morning. Before heading to work we thought it would be wise to check the "emergency hotline" number to determine whether the office was even open; we didn't know the extent of the outage. Picking up our home phone, we discovered that there was no dial-tone; we figured ice must have downed a telephone pole. So we then turned to our cellphone, only to discover that it, too, was out; the local cell tower must also be without power! So not only did we not have a way to see if work was open, we had no way to contact anyone. Without power or heat at home, we decided to head towards work anyway.

On our way to work, we ran into our next obstacle: road closed. Highway 141, the main North/South road between Trout Lake and the Columbia River, was closed for about 5 miles, and those 5 miles just happened to be right about where our house is. We later discovered that a large number of trees and power poles came down on the road along this section of the road. As luck would have it, there was a detour in place around the closure; if any other section of road was affected, there would be no detours available. So we took the detour and continued on to work.

Photo courtesy of White Salmon Enterprise

Arriving at work, we encountered our final obstacle: all of White Salmon, where our office is, was without power. Trees dropped large branches or just snapped in half, like the one on the left. The neighboring town of Bingen, however was not affected. Since Insitu actually occupies seven different buildings throughout White Salmon and Bingen, we head down to the main office in Bingen, found the first open work areas, and did what we could to be productive.

After a short and reasonably unproductive day at work, we headed into Portland with some friends to a previously scheduled dinner and Messiah sing-along. By the time we got home that night, it was after midnight, and by this point the house was in the 50s. We got a fire going in the woodstove (the fire Gods were smiling upon us that night - it started quickly and on the first attempt). By this point we had heard local news reports that stated the "PUD (Public Utility District) had no estimates for restoring power to Trout Lake", so we prepared for the long haul. In order to keep the fire going through the night, we estimated that we would have to add wood every 2 hours, so we set the alarm on our Palm for 2 hours and went to bed.

5.5 hours later, we woke up to a cold woodstove. (Apparently, the Palm isn't loud enough to awake us.) But the fire Gods were again with us, and we soon had another roaring fire going. By this time all water was cold, and the house was 52. We cooked some oatmeal on the stove and heated up as much hot water as we could. Our company holiday party was scheduled for that night, so we coordinated with a friend in Hood River (who did have power) to shower and change beforehand. (By this time our landline phone was back, but the cellphone was still out.) But as luck would have it, at 3pm Saturday afternoon the power was restored and all could return to normal.

It's a good thing we didn't live in the next town north, which is 15 miles away; the estimate for restoring their power was upwards of another 3-4 days! We may live in the country, but there are people who live in even more remote locations than we do! In fact, the power in Trout Lake was restored earlier than to most of Corinne's family living in Seattle. I guess we "country folk" have more experience with power outages (although it probably also helps that we have several orders of magnitude fewer people.)

- Mike (& Corinne)