Imagine that you wake up and turn on the coffee pot. Nothing happens. So you turn on the television. Nothing. Check your cell phone. No signal. What you don't know is that the entire grid has collapsed due to an EMP. Are you ready for this?
Of course, grid down events don't have to be as long term or as dramatic as this. Think hurricanes, tornadoes, or just severe storms. In any of these cases your electricity might be out hours, days, weeks or in extreme cases, months.
I'm sure lots of you read this with the "who cares, I'm ready" mentality. Are you really ready? Got your water, food, shelter, medicines and a way to protect yourself?
Wait... I said... are YOU ready?
I'm always surprised when I see really "preppers" that are physically in poor shape. When you have to depend on your body to survive, will it be able to handle the stress? (And I think there is a difference between being overweight and in poor shape. Myself, I am carrying probably 30 more pounds than I need. But I'm active, great blood pressure, normal cholesterol and the doc says that I'm perfectly healthy despite a little too much padding.)
I'm not going to tell you how to get in shape, there are a thousand of blogs and websites out there that talk about that. I will tell you that you need to start now; not tomorrow and not next week. Acquiring a decent fitness level takes time.
The other thing that surprises me is "preppers" who aren't acclimated to their area. If you keep your house at an even 70 degrees year around, are you in for a surprise! Life outside your four walls fluctuates, and, depending on where you live, fluctuates A LOT.
For us here in the deep south, that means dealing with hot and humid summers and cool damp winters.
During the winter we try to heat our house entirely with wood, so it tends somewhere around 68 degrees on the main floor and in the mid 50's upstairs in our room (we have a two story house with only one fireplace on the ground floor). Sure, it's brisk when you get out of bed or jump out of the shower, but it keeps our electricity bills low and if we hit a power outage it's not the end of the world for us. Most people think we are absolutely nuts and would never dream of their house being that cold.
Summers are challenging, but not bad. On the ground floor of the house we do run the a/c, set to 80 degrees. I realize this is way hot for some people, but we've gotten used to it. We don't use the a/c upstairs at all, and instead we rely on open patio doors and simple box fans. Of course, we spend a great deal of time outside, and seem to take the 80's and 90's better than most people we know. In the event that we lost the grid for any length of time, we can handle it. It's far easier to adapt to a 10 degree shift in temperature than 20 or 30!
The last thing I'll talk about here, is mental toughness. You would not believe the number of people I saw on the web complaining about having no a/c in 85 degree weather after a recent thunderstorm rolled through. These weren't just people either, these were prepper people. WTH?
I'll tell you how things went down for us, and I realize that our power came back on earlier than most.
In anticipation of the storm, my husband had set the alarm clock on his cell phone and had already showered. We had flashlights next to the bed and our NOAA radio with batteries charged.
On Sunday night we lost power at about 11pm. (The worst part for me was that the rain came blowing in and I had to shut our patio doors so the room stayed at 80 until enough of the storm had moved through that I could open the doors back up.)
By Monday morning our power was still out, but thanks to his cell the husband got up on time, got dressed, and had some cereal for breakfast (by headlamp).
When I got up later the power was still out, and my biggest concern was my incubators full of turkey, duck and chicken eggs, which I had wrapped in towels when the power initially went out to help hold in the heat. A check showed the temperature had dropped slightly but was still doing okay.
After that, I opened the doors to cool the house a bit more, then had some cereal. Once the house had cooled a bit, I closed up all the doors and window coverings, and went outside to check for damage and to make sure the animals were all okay.
Afterwards, I came inside and caught up on some light reading and crocheting, since it was too sloppy for much outside.
By the time the power came on at noon it was nearly 80 in the house and 85 outside.
My biggest source of stress during the whole event simply came down to whether or not my incubators would lose the 100+ eggs I had in there. Otherwise, we didn't complain, we just carried on with our days and our lives. Most people we know whined, went out to get coffee, or even called out of work because they couldn't shower.
I mean... REALLY?
There's no way to know what may happen in the event that our grid every truly goes down, but if you keep a steady frame of mind, are in fairly good shape and are acclimated to where you live, you should do fine. (If you can't acclimate to your area, NOW is a good time to look at living somewhere that you can survive.)
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