On the longest night we search for the light - Writer's Block: Lights Out

Most of my stories involving power outages involve tornado warnings *hides under bed, shivering*

Story #1: The regionally-dubbed "Day of Disaster", May 28th, 1996
The scariest day involving tornadoes and power outages happened on that day, when widespread areas of Kentucky suffered destruction due to several large tornadoes in a violent outbreak. I was playing at the kitchen table when I had to turn the light on because it was getting so dark. I looked at the clock and saw that it was only 3:30 in the afternoon, so of course my eyes went right to the sky and saw that the west was an bruised blue-black colour. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up and I knew something was quite wrong with that sky, and Mom knew it too and turned on the tv to the local news, while simultaneously grabbing all her prescription pills and stuffing them in her purse and putting her shoes on (this was a habit of hers whenever tornadic storms approached us, as we usually had to be evacuated). There were some dangerous storms heading right into our area.

The gust front of the storm quickly struck and passed over, with winds powerful enough to knock power out and knock small limbs right off their trees. We had no lights, no tv or radio to give us warnings, and the sky was a very freakish, bright overcast shade, though the house remained dark and humid with a strange grey pallor to the air. Luckily we had a weather radio, which was almost continually issuing tornado warnings and then damage reports for counties just west of us. It got too hot in the house and I was really spooked, and it spooks me right now to remember that weird sky and how very dark and silent it was in our house. Mom and I moved onto the covered front porch and watched the sky and listened to the quiet wind in the trees for a short time, and just as the weather radio issued a tornado warning for us, a police car drove through with all its lights on and commanding us to leave immediately for the local storm shelter, which was at the elementary school.

So that was where we hung out for a short time with the rest of the town until the tornado warning expired. When we got home, there was still no electricity and it was very stuffy, so Mom lit the trusty old kerosene lamps and sat them around as she and Dad opened up the kitchen and living room windows to let in some air. Lightning still danced in the unsettled western sky as night came on, and the weather radio continued to report tornado warnings and damage, and all we could do was tensely sit there and make do without power. Thankfully, power was restored by the following day, and that's when we found out the extent of the destruction in towns near us. Shepherdsville was only about ten miles east of us and was quite nearly wiped off the map. A trailer park several miles to our west was obliterated, but we ourselves suffered no damage.

Story #2: Mountain fire, February 2008
Many of you may remember this story. Thanks to high winds, zero humidity, and a fateful ember from someone's otherwise cold woodstove ashes, the entire side of the mountain ridge facing Montvale caught up in an uncontrollable brush fire. The sky was full of thick smoke and could be seen from miles and miles away in any direction, and the smoke rose over 5,000 feet. The air always smelled charred and acrid, and it was quite a sight in the dark, as it looked like veins of vivid lava. The morning after the mountain fire began, it had already spread quickly and was directly threatening Montvale. Between the mountains and Montvale stand thirty-two commercial oil tanks, and officials were very concerned about them. Very high winds had moved into the area ahead of a dramatic Arctic front, pushing the fire closer and closer to us. More mountain fires flared up in Roanoke and Salem. We received an evacuation call (which turned out only to be for a certain area of Montvale and not us directly), and then the high winds knocked all power out just as I told Trevor on MSN that I loved him and would talk to him again as soon as I could.

Debbie and I took Mom's car to get gas and to get a better look at the position of the fire, and that's where I took this pic: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=342939&l=b3259b27cf&id=671668336 If you look to the left, you can see some of the oil tanks in the near distance, in the path of the fire as it continued to diagonally descend. The road going to Troutville was closed off due to the thick smoke; we had been offered the chance to stay at Amanda's house if we got evacuated, but we couldn't have gotten there even if we'd wanted to.

Preparing to evacuate, we threw valuables and documents into bags and kept them by the front door, ready to go at any moment. We were really tense all day and had to rely solely on the weather radio and our own eyesight; Mom and I took a quick drive up the highway and examined the fire from a distance, trying to gauge its position and direction. Firefighters from Virginia and a couple other states were yet unable to create a fire line because of the super-high winds, and we passed one yard that had already been completely charred from an exploding transformer. The firefighters didn't want to take any risks. We heard the distant pulsing of helicopters as they swung over the fire to dump water or foam over it, but it hardly did any good. But then it veered away from our general direction as the wind changed course and started pushing it back across the mountain, going north.

That evening, as the Arctic front closed in, Mom went to Walmart to get some food and more kerosene. I thought I was going to go crazy without my nice electricity and nice furnace. We ate cold food and we bundled up in five or six layers, closed off the rest of the house and slept in the living room. It got down to 39*F in the house by around 6am, and it was only then that we found the big kerosene heater and brought it into the house. After about two hours of shivering and blowing clouds of vapour into the air, we got the house temperature back up into the mid 60's and I was able to ditch a couple layers of outer clothing. We heated water for instant coffee over that heater. The power company said that Montvale wouldn't be getting power back for 3-4 days, and I almost FREAKED. But suddenly, it came back on at about 1pm that day, and after the house got fully warmed up, I took a nice hot shower and reveled in being able to use my computer again and the fridge and such xDD

Losing power, especially in those situations, really makes me feel helpless. We rely on electricity way too much in this day and age, it's frightening.