NorthStarXO  

Each week we will cover current events and threat levels, news and how you can prepare your family and your home for natural and man-made disasters.

I hope that everyone had something special to do on Valentine's Day so that my absence wasn't missed as much! I meant to get online and cancel the show before the power went down because I knew they were doing maintenance on the generators here on the island.

We have no idea when we'll be back on normal power. What we understand is that the power surge that happened on the weekend of January 31st damaged the underwater cable to the point of melting some of the insulation. When they tried to bring the cable up this past week is actually broke into 2 pieces.

What they're looking into now is splicing that cable back together to get us temporary power and then laying a new cable which will cost $3.5 MILLION dollars plus another $1.5 Millon to lay that cable. So $5 Million which we as shareholders ofte co-op power company have to somehow pay for in this weird economy.

And still I won't move from here because I'm ok with this situation. We've cut back even more on our power usage, as much as possible. Were cooking as many meals as possible on the woodstove. Once it gets too warm for a fire I expect to use the grill a lot.

I hope eveyone of you is still prepping and stocking up and educating yourselves online.

Also, because of this situation the NorthStar Preparedness Network site is currently down but I hope to see that fixed later this week. I'll keep you posted.

Suzanne
NorthStar XO

Thankfully last Saturday's show was already cancelled before I got up that morning. The power was off. But it was back on by 9:30am. For 15 minutes and then back off again - for DAYS!

Seems the cable that runs under the Puget Sound from the mainland to our island blew. About 4:40am a tree came down on the 3-phase line on the island. When they repaired it and turned the power back on there was a surge and it was back off again.

So far they haven't been able to find where the problem is because the experts who know about underwater cables DON'T WORK IN THIS STATE!! How dumb is that?

So it'll be 2 weeks to a month before they figure out what wrong with the line and whether it can be repaired. Now I won't be off the air that long - I should be back on by next weekend. We currently have temporary power to the island in the form of two HUGE Cummins generators powering the island. They're the size of tractor trailers and they use 200-400 gallons of diesel a DAY.

Oh yeah - guess who pays for those generators? WE DO! $100,000 a month to rent them and $300,000-$400,000 a month for the fuel. My electricity bill is going from $0.0735 centers per Kw Hour to $0.22 cents per Kw Hour. That's TRIPLE!

For the first few days it was out we were fine. We were house-sitting for a family at the other end of the island and they had a generator so we ran it at their house for 3-6 hours on their fridge & chest freezer and then we brought it to our house to do the same thing so we didn't lose any food. Oh yeah, did I mention that after that power came back on, for those 15 minutes on that first Saturday we left the island to go do our monthly grocery shopping. $300 worth of food - HUGE shoulders of beef & pork to cut and/or grind, lots of freezer stuff.

We have a woodstove and the house were were sitting for had running water because the upper end of the island is gravity fed while my end of the island has wells. So I used 6- 5 gallon buckets along with our usual regiment of 2L pop bottles of water and gallon milk jugs and we would get water when we swapped the generator. I put a stew on the woodstove to cook all day while we worked to prep the houses. We brought up more wood for our house, manually lit the propane stove in his house. We moved all the freezer food that was in the refrigerator to the chest freezer which we were totally impressed with how well it stayed frozen for such a long period.

Our woodstove has two levels - a large lower level and a top part that is not as long. I put my canning pot on the top part full of water for hot water to clean & bathe in. I cooked on the lower level and once we were done cooking I put on more pots of water. My daughter stayed at the other house so we sent Paul's son up there since they had propane heat & stove and running water so she could get him a hot bath. Paul and I stayed at our house and tended things here. We have about 12 oil lamps so we took a couple up to the other house along with spare fuel and wicks for the lamps and gas for the generator.

Our power came back on Monday afternoon and now we're on generators for at least 4 weeks. There are brown outs and black outs when they take the generators off line to service them every 3-4 days. We're not supposed to run our clothes dryers, computers, etc. We've been running ours only an hour or two a day to check emails, etc.

They handed out packs of flourescent blubs for all of us to use. Man are they DIM! But they need us to keep our average usage below 1500Kw hours so that we don't blow the breakers on the generators. We're really good about this kind of thing anyway.

They had a town hall meeting on Wednesday to let us know the scoop. If they can repair the line it'll be a couple months. If they have to replace it it could take a year or more and the cost is $3.5-4 MILLION dollars.

 

They're trying to get some FEMA grants or such to help cut the costs but this wasn't a natural disaster. And our power company is a co-op so there's not share holders, etc. to use money from.

 

We use about 810 Kw hours per month so our bill will go from $50 to $135 a month. Thankfully we don't have cable TV, satellites, etc. and all those things that need constant power. The most techonolgy we have are the computers and my desktop got fried the last time the power went out. This is coming from my laptop.

 

So - prep, prep, prep!!! You never know when something is going to happen - long or short term!

 

Suzanne

NorthStarXO

 

Thankfully last Saturday's show was already cancelled before I got up that morning. The power was off. But it was back on by 9:30am. For 15 minutes and then back off again - for DAYS!

Seems the cable that runs under the Puget Sound from the mainland to our island blew. About 4:40am a tree came down on the 3-phase line on the island. When they repaired it and turned the power back on there was a surge and it was back off again.

So far they haven't been able to find where the problem is because the experts who know about underwater cables DON'T WORK IN THIS STATE!! How dumb is that?

So it'll be 2 weeks to a month before they figure out what wrong with the line and whether it can be repaired. Now I won't be off the air that long - I should be back on by next weekend. We currently have temporary power to the island in the form of two HUGE Cummins generators powering the island. They're the size of tractor trailers and they use 200-400 gallons of diesel a DAY.

Oh yeah - guess who pays for those generators? WE DO! $100,000 a month to rent them and $300,000-$400,000 a month for the fuel. My electricity bill is going from $0.0735 centers per Kw Hour to $0.22 cents per Kw Hour. That's TRIPLE!

For the first few days it was out we were fine. We were house-sitting for a family at the other end of the island and they had a generator so we ran it at their house for 3-6 hours on their fridge & chest freezer and then we brought it to our house to do the same thing so we didn't lose any food. Oh yeah, did I mention that after that power came back on, for those 15 minutes on that first Saturday we left the island to go do our monthly grocery shopping. $300 worth of food - HUGE shoulders of beef & pork to cut and/or grind, lots of freezer stuff.

We have a woodstove and the house were were sitting for had running water because the upper end of the island is gravity fed while my end of the island has wells. So I used 6- 5 gallon buckets along with our usual regiment of 2L pop bottles of water and gallon milk jugs and we would get water when we swapped the generator. I put a stew on the woodstove to cook all day while we worked to prep the houses. We brought up more wood for our house, manually lit the propane stove in his house. We moved all the freezer food that was in the refrigerator to the chest freezer which we were totally impressed with how well it stayed frozen for such a long period.

Our woodstove has two levels - a large lower level and a top part that is not as long. I put my canning pot on the top part full of water for hot water to clean & bathe in. I cooked on the lower level and once we were done cooking I put on more pots of water. My daughter stayed at the other house so we sent Paul's son up there since they had propane heat & stove and running water so she could get him a hot bath. Paul and I stayed at our house and tended things here. We have about 12 oil lamps so we took a couple up to the other house along with spare fuel and wicks for the lamps and gas for the generator.

Our power came back on Monday afternoon and now we're on generators for at least 4 weeks. There are brown outs and black outs when they take the generators off line to service them every 3-4 days. We're not supposed to run our clothes dryers, computers, etc. We've been running ours only an hour or two a day to check emails, etc.

They handed out packs of flourescent blubs for all of us to use. Man are they DIM! But they need us to keep our average usage below 1500Kw hours so that we don't blow the breakers on the generators. We're really good about this kind of thing anyway.

They had a town hall meeting on Wednesday to let us know the scoop. If they can repair the line it'll be a couple months. If they have to replace it it could take a year or more and the cost is $3.5-4 MILLION dollars.

 

They're trying to get some FEMA grants or such to help cut the costs but this wasn't a natural disaster. And our power company is a co-op so there's not share holders, etc. to use money from.

 

We use about 810 Kw hours per month so our bill will go from $50 to $135 a month. Thankfully we don't have cable TV, satellites, etc. and all those things that need constant power. The most techonolgy we have are the computers and my desktop got fried the last time the power went out. This is coming from my laptop.

 

So - prep, prep, prep!!! You never know when something is going to happen - long or short term!

 

Suzanne

NorthStarXO