Fifth Day Rejoicing

After the initial relief of actually having a light go on when the switch is pressed, I’ve decide to post-mortem our four days in the dark. I don’t want to forget all those who are still without power, my heart goes out to them.

Although I’d expected to have some fun “camping out” as it were, mostly I found it frustrating. The endless calls from JCP&L “press 1 if you’re power is on, press two if you are still without power,”  or the announcement that your power is “restored.” Reading that First Energy was grumbling about having to raise rates due to the cost of restoring power.  What, are you guys kidding?

That and the pronouncements from local politicians that any minute everything would be back to normal, and then seeing businesses light up and houses stay dark. I also wished that cell connections had been more available, it was our only connection to the outside world and news.

I would like to commend both the Morristown and Morris Township-Morris Plains patch for providing the best source of news and events available. They allowed reporters and residents to cooperate in tracking the outages, which turned out to be infinitely superior to the outage map from the power utility. Patch is much more than a newspaper and we are very grateful for it.

I think we need to recognize the workers at JCP&L. Through their efforts I can once again flush a toilet. Thanks, really, thanks. I don’t have as many nice things to say about the management though.  I will be interested to see how the Ridgedale substation is rebuilt as well as if they will be more proactive about tree trimming and clearing.

A special shout-out of thanks to the Morris Township sewer department who came and hot-wired my waste tank pump after it filled up. That was a huge relief.  I heard that they had to sandbag the doors to stop the early flood waters and save the treatment plant. Nice job guys. That would have been a real disaster.

I’m going through what worked and what didn’t around our house, for my Domesti-tech column with Gannett. We never had to bug-out to a hotel but it was getting pretty grim around here. Not being to empty our own waste tank, we pump up to the street, is a real problem.  One that we’ll have to bite the bullet and remedy. Esposito's electric gave us an estimate of $900 to hook the generator directly to the wiring panel. That's remarkably cheap compared to some I've seen. It just irks me to spend $350 on a generator and then almost a thousand to hook it to the house.

Other than that our little 3500 watt Costco generator kept the refrigerators cold and we only had to run it twice a day for several hours.  We even hooked up the coffee maker in the morning, which brightened our whole day. However most of our night time light came from two Coleman “white fuel” lanterns which I can't say enough good things about.

After Irene I will never consider an electric hot water heater again.  Our gas heater delivered lots of piping hot water, even if we couldn’t run it down the drain. The impromptu outdoor shower, run from the kitchen sink, was a godsend.

I’m ordering a new battery powered radio today. Our old one, in a word, stank.  I’ll look for a multi-band “world radio” with the best antenna I can get.  When nothing is working radio is key. As it turns out, pocket sized Nebo flashlights turned out to be little lifesavers.  They ran on a single AA the entire time and are blindingly bright. I had just got one that clips to my shirt which helped with washing dishes on the deck and making dinner. 

We also found out our portable scanner kept us completely up to date on what was going on around us.  We had to listen for quite a while but eventually tidbits of information came through. I just wished the Morris OEM (office of emergency management) had an hourly radio bulletin, or if there was one I missed it.  Something to think about.

All in all it was quite an experience and it’s not over for lots of us. Let me know if I can help.