I have been recently reading the blog: A Chemist in Langley and only realized earlier today that this is the Langley just thirty minutes across the border from the neighboring town of Sumas.
Blair and his family went through the same storm that we did with much of the same consequences - power outages, lack of resources, etc...
From his post:
Lessons learned from the BC Wind Storm
Like many of my readers I spent much of the weekend dealing with the consequences of the big windstorm that hit the west coast on the weekend. For those of you not aware, what was supposed to be a pretty typical rainstorm ended up being massive wind storm which, at its peak, knocked out power to over 500,000 people in Metro Vancouver. Given our population (about 2.5 million) that means about 1 in 5 households was affected by the power outage. Our house was one of the 500,000 and, unfortunately, we were one of the last of the big substations to be energized so many individual houses in our area still don’t have power 48 hours after the end of the storm. This post is a bit of a post-mortem or as we say in my field a “post-incident analysis” where I will share some of the things I learned from this storm to help prepare our household for “the Big One” (the predicted earthquake that we all know is coming on the west coast). It also ends with some unsolicited advice for our friends at BC Hydro about their communications strategy for the storm.
In my work the way we improve our safety performance is through post-incident safety assessments. Every negative safety incident is accompanied by a post-incident analysis. This involves looking at the incident and asking the question: “what is the worst thing that could have happened”. We then do a root-cause analysis in order to establish and address the root cause of the incident. Ideally in doing this, similar incidents can be avoided in the future. In addition to incidents we also track and investigate every “near miss”. A near miss is an event that could have resulted in an incident but did not. Usually the difference between a near miss and an incident is simply good luck (i.e. a trip that caused a bump but didn’t break a bone). In our industry a near miss is seen as a “free learning”: an opportunity to catch a problem before someone gets hurt.
Without belittling the cost this windstorm had in human hardship and financial losses it pretty much represents a near miss when compared to the Big One. In this case only 1 in 5 households was hit, in daytime, on a weekend, in summer and only power was affected. We have been warned that in the event of the Big One, we have to be in a position to take care of ourselves without outside help for a minimum of 72 hours. That means assuming that the entire lower mainland is affected; that power, water and natural gas supplies will be offline; and we can expect no help of any kind (except from our neighbours) for at least three days.
Looking at our how our family emergency plan held up during the power outage it was clear that while we did a lot of things right, we have some serious holes to address. We have a reasonable store of water and dried goods and while we would be uncomfortable we would not starve nor lack for water for three-to-five days. Now for the biggest holes.
Much more at the site - a good read for those starting to build preparedness into their daily lives. We (by choice) live at the very tail-end of a long chain and the places with concentrated population will get their services restored soon while we get our services restored later. Having the resources to live on our own for a couple weeks without external sources of food, water, heat, fuel, etc... is a good practice to develop. It literally is not a matter of IF
Instead, it is more a matter of WHEN
Some of the periodic events are very much overdue...
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