DorrieDorrie

Ice Storm1

The middle of last week was a balmy 60 degrees around here.

The next day, it started to rain, and the temperature dropped, and ICE arrived. Conditions deteriorated massively between about 9pm (when I got home from grocery shopping) and 11pm (when the nurse arrived at our house).

The power went out first around 11, and stayed out for about a half hour. Luckily, we had anticipated something of this nature, and had swapped Dorrie to the suction machine with the battery in it, so it was more or less charged. Our big vent battery was also charged. We disconnected her from the non-running humidifier and stuck an HME into her vent circuit. Another plus, we FINALLY got our equipment provider to switch us from the non AD/AN friendly O2 concentrator to liquid O2 just 10 days before all this happened. So our oxygen supply was not dependent upon electricity.

After the power came on and seemed as if it was going to stay on, I went to bed, and managed to sleep through the next outage, which lasted from about 2am – 6:30am. Bob had the foresight to begin recharging the vent battery directly it came on, so when the power went down once more at 9:30am, it was mostly ready to go again.

The power company couldn’t predict how long it would be before we got our power back, so we were trying to figure out what to do exactly if it should stay off too long. Obviously staying at home is the preference — hospitals have sick people in them and we have not had great experiences with the one in town anyway. But reports suggested that most of the northern part of town had power, so getting a room in a hotel and sneaking Dorrie in was an option.

Happily, PSNH restored our power by about 1:20pm on Friday and it has been up since then, so we never had to pick where to go. We are on the priority list with them, but there’s also a fire station just down the road, so we may well be on the circuit with them too. We’re also fortunate in that we live in a densely packed area which is right next to the highway — there are trees around but not so many as in some parts of town, and the roads tend to be kept pretty clear. As I’m writing this though, there are still over 15,000 people in town who don’t have power back, and over 150,000 in the state! It looks like power at my mom’s house didn’t come back on until some time today (she had already planned to spend the weekend here) as all of her food in her fridge was still warm when she got home this afternoon. PSNH has a twitter feed that actually appears to have someone reading it and responding to peoples’ questions.

Posted by mom, under we interrupt this blog