A LESSON IN PREPAREDNESS -- 30 Hours Without Power, and a Sony Radio.

I haven't posted much here recently for a bunch of reasons. Some of it is that I just haven't brought myself to finish some posts that were in the works earlier, during the Fall last year. Some of it is just an overall ennui I've been trying to kick.

Either way, life has been going the way it usually goes... Day after day, mostly greyish weather, very little Winter here, actually. We had maybe three nights where it went under freezing -- including a couple where it was 26 or 27F (well into the minuses on the Centigrade scale).  Working out in a cold store-room where it is 30F/-1C is an invigorating experience.

The night before last it was -2C / 29 degrees F. Thick frost everywhere.

I felt like yelling out into the night: "We finally got Winter!!"

The venerable Sony ICF-38 AM-FM portable radio -- excellent for disaster and emergency preparedness

LET THERE BE WIND, AND THERE WAS WIND

But I digress. About two weeks ago we had a small windstorm here in the Seattle area. In some parts of the metro, it was quite windy. In my wind-protected section of town, there were maybe 30-40 mph gusts, and although it's enough to hit windstorm status, it's nothing like the 90 mph winds my suburb sustained during the 1962 Columbus Day storm, or even the Inauguration Day storm of 1993.

When I went outside during the windstorm, it actually seemed a bit breezy, although on the hills above my part of town it probably was a lot breezier.

Anyway, after a while, and into the night -- the lights began to flicker, about 1 a.m on a Saturday night /early Sunday morning. The FM station we were listening to even went off the air twice, for short intervals, before staying back on.

Then, about 1:30 or 2 a.m., the lights here in my area went out altogether.

After about 15 minutes of the lights being out, I got out the trusty LED flashlights, and my equally trusty Sony ICF-38 (none of my Superadios -- except for one in another part of the house -- had batteries).

My mom, who is retired, was staying with me, and I took my Sony ICF-38 downstairs so she would have a radio to listen to. As we were listening to NPR at the time the lights went off, I switched the Sony to NPR's FM outlet and set the radio in the living room near where my mom was sitting in a recliner chair. I adjusted the volume to a moderate level. Not room-filling, but adequate.

THE SONY ICF-38 AM-FM RADIO JUST KEEPS CHUGGING

I made tea using a propane burner, lit candles, and dug out an LED lantern that I bought somewhere for a couple bucks over a year ago. It -- along with my best, trusty LED flashlight, were my companions in the house, so I wouldn't trip over anything, including my cat. :-)

As it was cold, and dark, I couldn't do much. I boiled a few eggs to eat. Made some soup from a dry mix. I went for a couple long bike rides in the dark, which was actually quite fun. A lot of people had candles visible in their houses, and there were several houses with generators buzzing in the night.

Then I got home, and went to bed, to DX the radio airwaves a bit, and get some extra sleep in. Meanwhile, the Sony is still playing downstairs.

12 hours later, the power was still off. I couldn't believe it, as the windstorm wasn't that massive. Meanwhile, the Sony was still playing -- this time I tuned it to the AM talk station my mom likes.

12 hours after that, the power was still off. I was beginning to wonder if I was going to have to shower in the cold so I could go to work Monday morning. Meanwhile, the Sony was still playing in the living room.

Then the power finally came back on, early Monday morning -- a full 30 hours after it went off. And the Sony was still playing, on battery power.

It still has juice left in the batteries, too! I used it a couple nights later to do some DX listening while falling asleep.

 

My Sony ICF-38 with a couple unnamed gingerbread men, travelling some time around Christmas 2016.

WHEN THE BIG ONE HITS, WE'RE SCREWED

The lesson I learned from all of this is two-fold:

First, if and when the Big One hits, were screwed. There is no doubt in my mind that the electrical grid can't handle a massive, disastrous shaking that could bring down electrical powerlines -- even to the extent projected by the experts, including FEMA.

If a small windstorm can cut power to wide swaths of suburbia within miles of one of America's highest tech cities, what is going to happen if / when powerlines are knocked down all over the region in a 4 to 6 minute 9.0 Earthquake -- which experts now say may make it impossible to remain standing up in the Seattle area?

Second, Sony made an excellent portable radio product. The ICF-38 is a wonderful machine -- it played for 30 hours straight on battery power, at moderate volume; both on power-sucking FM and less power consuming AM, and it kept going, and going, and going, and going....

And the AA batteries that were in the Sony weren't fresh, mind you. I had used it to hear football games, talk shows at night, and to DX with -- probably for 8-10 hours or so the days before the storm hit.

You get the idea.

Unfortunately, the ICF-38 is no longer made, and whatever ICF-38's you can find are increasingly expensive. There are two small Sony pocket radios that have the same analog IF chip (CXA1019), that probably are light on batteries, that one can get new, though.  For those in earthquake territory, those radios might be worth checking into. The CXA1019 is a good chip -- it works at low voltages quite well, and is a sensitive chip.

I can't think of a current radio, by any brand, that is easier on batteries than my Sony ICF-38 -- not even my beloved Sangeans are as light on batteries.

After doing some reading on the potential for grid failures, whether due to terrorism, Carrington events, EMP attacks, and the like, I am convinced that everyone who wants to stay informed -- or even remotely entertained -- during any such event needs a decent radio, especially a decent AM radio which is easy on batteries.

Face it, your cell phone will fail you within two days. My cell phone -- which I used early in the morning to report a dark traffic light -- was on 40% battery when the lights went out. I had to turn it off to keep it from running down to nothing.  A lot of people can't really turn their phones off in cases like that. Even if you have a recharger, your recharger will also run out of juice after a day or so, and it will be a nice, high tech looking doorstop. If the power is out regionally for an extended period of time, forget about buying gas. Or buying anything. The Debit cards won't work, and cash is as rare as hen's teeth.

It takes the grid to keep all of those things going.

Even though chances of some of those events happening are slim, natural disasters can hit at any time -- be it a 7 or 9 point earthquake, a hurricane, a volcano, massive ice storm, fires, etc.

And the fact I went 30 hours without power in a large, technically modern metro area of the United States, when it should have been more like 5 or 6 at most, says something.

In other events, Christmas came and went. The above pic is from Christmas 2017, when we had snow, and I played my bagpipes outside at midnight, in a local park, in the snow. Just for the heck of it. The pic was taken the morning after I did so, when I got home from visiting a relative in the hospital. The little New Zealand flag sticker in my pipe case is left over from some piping festival that I attended in the 1980's, probably in California somewhere.

Right now it's January, which is a blah month of the year. The news is non-stop politics, and the approaching Super Bowl means football season will soon be over. Another year already.

I hope to have a few more blog posts this year than I did in 2018. One can always keep their fingers crossed.

Peace,

CBC 1-17-2019