Surviving Blizzards, Cold Snaps, and Power Outages

Up here in northern New England, we have had our fair share of walloping Nor’easters. One year, blizzard conditions rolled into town at night, and we’d accumulated 10 inches of wet, heavy snow, and lost power within hours.

When we lose power, our two wood stoves—one of them a modern cookstove with an oven—keep us warm and well-fed, and prevent our pipes from freezing.

Before the Blizzard

This is our emergency-preparation routine:

• We leave the chickens indoors, with plenty of food and water.
• We assemble charged flashlights and kerosene lamps on the kitchen table.
• We load the wood boxes.
• We locate the snow shovels and the roof rake, and set them inside the greenhouse (our entry to the rest of the house).
• We take showers and leave the tub half-filled with flushing water, in anticipation of a power outage. We fill a couple of big stockpots with drinking and cooking water.

After the Blizzard

During a particularly bad nighttime blizzard, after a fitful sleep, we awoke to 14 inches of snow, still wet and heavy, still coming down. By mid-morning, the snow had stopped.

Be sure you have strong shovels on hand! After the snow stopped, we donned outdoor gear and tackled two hours plus of heavy shoveling. Our fridge and root cellar were full. We had non-perishable food and water in the pantry.

Stock a battery-powered radio (rechargeable with a hand crank). As telephone cables were downed by the blizzard, our radio told us that hundreds of thousands were without power. Roads in town couldn’t even be plowed until utility crews arrived to saw up downed trees and untangled dangerous wires on the road.

By then, our utility’s emergency phone line was telling us to prepare for a “multi-day event.” They’d called in hundreds of utility-line workers from eastern Canada and as far south as Tennessee. My big concern: lack of power to the two big freezers in the cellar that hold a season’s worth of homegrown fruits and vegetables—our winter stash. I threw insulating quilts over them and hoped for the best.

I’ve lived most of my life in rural towns in northern New England, and over the decades, I’ve learned a few hard lessons about winter. No matter how well-prepared I think I am, I sometimes forget essentials, and things come up that I hadn’t imagined.

• What do you do when your septic system freezes? The year my daughter Molly was two, our aged septic drain pipe cracked underground, leaked, and froze solid from early December until mid-April. (We’ve long since replaced it.) That winter we sponge-bathed, tossed dishwater into the bushes behind the woodshed, and fashioned a series of makeshift toilets in the basement: 5-gallon buckets and ample amounts of wood ashes. Come spring, we trucked the pails far into the sugarbush, dug holes, and buried the contents.
• What happens if you hurt yourself? During a three-day blizzard, I sliced my finger to the bone hacking away at a winter squash. The gash really needed stitches, but there was no way we could get out and drive the 20 miles to an urgent care center. I disinfected it, bathed it in a strong infusion of dried yarrow leaves (with styptic, antimicrobial, and anti-inflammatory properties), then applied pressure with a sterile bandage until the bleeding slowed. I wrapped it with a dry, sterile gauze pad and bound it tightly with a big wad of duct tape. The next morning, I undid the bandage. The bleeding had stopped and I was pleased to note no swelling or oozing. I disinfected the area again, applied four butterfly bandages to keep the wound edges together, and again wrapped it with duct tape. Check our other tips for health emergencies.

The message for rural-dwellers: Maintain a well-stocked first-aid kit, with bandages of all sizes and shapes, including butterfly bandages, self-adhesive elastic bandages, and a big roll of duct tape. I also keep bottles of over-the-counter pain-killers and liquid antihistamine, plenty of disinfectant, a digital thermometer, and a pair of fine-pointed tweezers for removing slivers. Check our tips for creating an emergency home kit and an emergency car kit.

Lessons learned from the latest storm

• Have a backup plan for the landline. Last summer, our small town finally got wired with fiber-optic cable, and we signed up. One thing the sales and technical folks failed to tell us was that the optical cable, and along with it, our landline, would fail along with the power. Despite an 18-hour backup system in the basement, our phone did fail, and we spent one night and half the next day without any connection to the outside world. That was frightening. The high cost and poor cell service in our area has kept us from going mobile, but we’ve since found a very low-cost pay-as-you-go phone that connects with the most reliable service.
• Keep an eye on the fire extinguishers. Midway through the storm, I thought to check the three we keep on hand; two all-purpose ones for the wood-stove areas, a smaller one for kitchen fires perched on the shelf alongside the herbs and spices over the gas stove. All had expired! We tend our stoves with care, keep combustibles far from both the stoves, and store the ashes in a covered metal trash barrel on a cement floor, but an accident, a moment of carelessness, or an electrical problem could cause a blaze.
• Keep fresh batteries in the smoke detectors. I suddenly remembered we hadn’t changed the backup batteries in our hard-wired smoke detector system since it was installed three years ago. Guess what? We were out of the 9-volt batteries the system required.

After we recovered from the storm, I headed off to buy three new fire extinguishers, a cell phone, and a package of 9-volt batteries for the smoke alarms.

Do you have any tips for surviving blizzards? Let us know below!

Plus, check out our tips for getting through power outages.