Power failure in San Diego provides a good test run - are you prepared for a natural or manmade disaster?

The afternoon and night of September 8, 2011 in San Diego County was an interesting time. It was the largest power failure in San Diego history. The power when out to over 1.5 million homes. It spread from Arizona to Southern California. Parts of New Mexico, Arizona and Baja Mexico were also affected.

For those of us prepared for natural disaster it was a great test run to see how our equipment and supplies shaped up. When the power first went out, we stepped outside to see if it was just us or the neighborhood. All our neighbors said their power was out. We turned on our battery powered radio to find out it was County wide. Two of our neighbors had no battery operated radios so we shared batteries and information.

With this wide spread of an outage I knew power would not be restored quickly. As darkness fell I fired up our Colman gas lantern, got out emergency candles and prepped our small generator.

We had a nice evening on the patio reading and listening to the radio. I ran our generator for an hour to charge cell phones and the power the refrigerator. All worked as planned.

Now that the power has been restored we have to start boiling water for a few days. But last night it was nice to know our plans and equipment were ready to go and worked just fine. It was a good test run.

For emergency supplies and equipment check out companies like:

www.essentialpacks.com            www.lifesecure.com