Power outage - does and don'ts

 

After experiencing a power outage that lasted about 3 hours, there are things that I wanted to write about because of things I have seen and learned about after the power outage.

Living in an apartment building

• Once the power is out, the emergency generators will kick in so that there will be emergency lights in the halls and stairwells. The generator will also mean that there will be one elevator that is working, so if you don’t have to go out it’s a good idea just to stay home or, if possible, use the stairs.
• Make sure that you keep your refrigerator and freezer doors closed to keep the cold in these areas so that you can keep the food from going bad.
• Turn off any lights that you had on when the power went out, or at least try and remember which lights were turned on.
• Water is also going to be impacted, so remember that if you don’t need to flash the toilet, it’s a good idea not to. As soon as the water goes out, ensure that you at least fill up a glass with some water, as you will probably get thirsty at some point.
• Now, here is a major don’t do. Do not use the outlets in the hall for your personal use, as these outlets are using the emergency generator for their power. I did hear that in some apartment buildings, people were taking their microwaves out into the hall to make lunch. This is not good because you don’t know how long the power is going to be out, and you could be endangering the lives of others in your building, especially if the generator runs out of power.

Driving

• Remember that if the traffic lights are out, that means that the intersection is now a four way stop. Yes, that means that you must stop at the intersection and not just drive through the intersection. Again, this could result in an accident if all directions think they can just drive.

Pedestrians

• If you need to cross the road, remember that there are also cars trying to get around and some may not stop at the intersection, so be extremely careful.
  

Living in a house

• The biggest one for this is to make sure that you keep your refrigerator and freezer closed to ensure that you keep your food cold.
• Turn off any of the lights that you had on when the power went out.

Summary

Yes, a power outage can be a disruption and could mean that you are going to have to do things a little differently but remember you aren’t the only one dealing with the outage. Power outages aren’t something that anyone likes to deal with, but at least making sure that you do the right thing to help manage the situation, everything will be ok.

 

Power outages

Everyone has to deal with power outages from time to time and it is something that we just deal with and understand that they don’t happen too often. I know when I was growing up we had power outages in Toronto that would last for hours and we just got into the happen of dealing with them. Now a days power outages don’t happen as frequently and normally they don’t last as long except when it is due to major failures or ice storms.

This is being written just after we had a power outage in our neighbourhood and I have to say that I am glad that we don’t get them very often. My parents who don’t live too far from us get them more often but again they are the ones that don’t last very long but just long enough that all the clocks and electronics need to be corrected. I understand that no everyone is going to be happy when there is a power outage but it is something that you just have to deal with.

Our most recent power outage happened on a Sunday morning and of course when you live in an apartment building there are going to be things that just don’t work as well without power and one of those is water. Yes, if you live up a few floors the water requires pressure to come up to the units so without power the water is going to stop flowing so one of the first things you need when you lose power is to ensure that you have some drinking water handy. For us as we weren’t sure how long the power was going to be out we quickly filled a couple of the water bottles that we take to the gym with us so we had some water handy. Another issue is that the elevators go down to one elevator and that is on the emergency generator so it is something you have to figure may not last the entire outage if the outage is extremely long. These are the common sense issues that you deal with when their is no power in an apartment building.

This last outage was about an hour and a half but shortly after it happened there was a knock on our unit door and I figured it must be the women from across the hall and sure enough it was. She was checking to see if we had power but I am not sure why because she had just been downstairs to check about the situation. As I was standing at the door of the unit she was complaining that we only had one elevator and it was wrong. Also she said that the assistance supers had said they might have to turn that one off as well. The elevator would be staying on as long as the emergency generator had power as it is required that one be working even in a power outage.

Something else that the women was complaining about was she couldn’t check the website to see if Toronto Hydro was saying anything about the issue in our neighbourhood because she didn’t have internet. Well, to have internet you need power so yes it would be difficult to check it from a computer even if it was a laptop or tablet. I had my mobile device in my hand and from right after I saw the power outage I was checking both twitter and the Toronto Hydro outage page for any updates so I let her know that there wasn’t anything on either of these two spots. She complained about how any power outages we had and some of them are hours long. I am not sure what she was talking about because we don’t have very many power outages compared to some of the other areas in Toronto.

After dealing with all of her comments we figured it might be time to escape as we hadn’t had a coffee yet and by this time it was 45 minutes into the power outage and we weren’t sure how long it was going to be. Yes, leaving the unit we decided it would be best to just walk down the stairs so that we didn’t have to deal with waiting for the one elevator and also it was good exercise. We stopped by the first floor to check if there were any updates and there weren’t but at least we found about it was a larger area than just our apartment or even our neighbourhood.

The end result was the power was out for about an hour and a half, so yes longer than lot of the power outages but still not bad. We got some running around done that we were wanting to do and we had some coffee so overall we accomplished things. Power outages are something that you deal with when they happen and you also have to appreciate that compared to years ago the power outages we deal with now are so much shorter and less frequent.