Gunner Quinn
I really did not give a lot of thought ahead of time about the approaching storm. I spent time at U.S. Naval Station Guantanamo in Cuba growing up and I have lived through several hurricanes in the Southeast. I won’t make that mistake again. I now see how we can get way too comfortable with the daily situation live in and not see the forest for the trees. My work location is several hours from my home which is in the mountains of Western North Carolina. I work from home about half the time and was in the mountains when the storm hit. I have been interested in preparedness for a long time and that interest proved very beneficial.
Most of the media coverage of the storm’s effects has centered around the town of Asheville, North Carolina. That area was greatly damaged but the entire Western part of the state was affected. Based on what we are seeing now, the recovery effort will take a long time. The downtown area of one town, Chimney Rock, is totally gone.
I was working Friday morning as normal and went upstairs for lunch. It was during that lunch that we got the first indications that things were about to get interesting. My wife and I noticed that power was out and were quickly able to determine it was not an isolated outage. Our house is about 6 miles outside of a small town. We’re about 90 minutes west of Asheville on a two-lane road. Things at first were pretty relaxed but I did pull out my solar generator to run Starlink. We have limited cell coverage in the best of times and Starlink allowed me to maintain some connectivity. Around dinner time, I pulled out one of my Butane camp stoves so we could cook dinner. With no electricity we went to bed early.
Saturday morning, we were still getting drenched and had no electricity. We also were not seeing much traffic. I drove into town and noticed the power outage was widespread. I also noticed that there was no cell service and none of the normal hotspots had internet coverage from the normally available WiFi. When I got back to the house, I went ahead and pulled out the two Honda generators and fired them up to run the fridge and freezer. I also used them to recharge the solar generator. The two small Honda generators gave us all the power we needed and were much quieter than the whole-house generators we heard constantly. While we didn’t need food, my wife did want some cheese so we went to a large grocery store near town. That was when we started to see other issues.
It surprised me walking in when I heard a woman tell her young daughter “don’t worry, the power will be back on later today, I’m sure.” Also, walking into the store, I noticed a large sign on the doors indicating the store was on a cash-only policy. No credit cards, debit cards, or checks allowed. We actually saw several people turned away at the registers for lack of cash. We were less than 24 hours in and people were already beginning to get upset. We also found out that none of the ATMs nearby were working because of a lack of internet service. Anyway, we picked up the cheese, and several other things just to make sure we were covered and went home.
Still no electricity, cellular phone, or Internet service but with our camp stove and prepped food we were fine.
Late Saturday a line crew from out of state started working in our area to try and locate the source of our outage. I walked out to talk with the supervisor and he had some interesting insight. The local utility had stopped using handheld radios for their crews. They depended on cell service for crews walking the powerlines to locate issues. The problem was no cell service for days after the storm came through. The crews would drop off a lineman who would walk the line and then meet the rest of the crew. They would then go back and make handwritten notes on where the problems were.
The utility also did not have a workaround for work orders since the internet was down so all work orders were handwritten on legal pads. This slowed down the repair work because when a crew finished one job they had to go back to a central location to find out where their next job would be. The crews worked tirelessly to restore service but their job were made much harder, in my opinion, by the lack of resiliency of the operation.
My ham radio group was a great source of information both in our area and in the larger area affected by the storm. Most local media operations played catchup for a few days just trying to get into the most severely affected parts of the state. I also heard information on the ham nets that was just not reported on either the local or national news. There apparently was some looting in several towns that I never heard reported. Local and state police also worked really hard but were hampered by a lack of communications ability. A reliance on cell technology and the internet reportedly hampered law enforcement and other first responders. Again, the officers, firefighters and EMTs gave selflessly of themselves but they had a more difficult time because of the reliance on newer technology.
Our electrical service was restored after about three days in our area. We never had problems with water service because we are on a gravity-fed storage system. Had the electrical situation not resolved itself that would have eventually become an issue when the storage tank ran dry. I did have several hundred gallons of water stored but… Sewer service was not an issue since we are on a house septic system where the drain field is below the level of our house.
All in all, we did okay during the outage. But there were several things that I learned and will work to remedy.
Whole house generators are loud. I kept thinking they make you a target, especially when you turn all the lights in your house on when everyone else is dark. Yes, someone at a house nearby actually did that. Inverter generators seem to make less noise. Our solar generator, for the most part, kept up with needs for Ham radio and Starlink but I want to add more resiliency there.
Additional cooking options would have been helpful had the situation been longer in duration. Had one of my two Butane stoves had issues we could have been on the edge.
Neighbors did not have the ability to communicate with each other. While I am a licensed ham operator, I am investing in some GMRS radios that I can lend to folks who live nearby. Had the situation gone on for a longer period of time I believe that would have been helpful both from a security and comfort perspective.
Having cash on hand could have proved invaluable. We did not have to worry about the grocery stores because of our food stockpile. But pretty much all stores in the area were on a cash only policy. Hardware and drug stores were not immune. Even now, nearly a week after the event, many ATM’s are not working and stores that do have the ability to take credit and debit cards are not allowing ANY cash back.
We didn’t talk about security preps with folks in the area but I realized that most had no way to defend themselves. The idea came up during a conversation about the looting in other towns when one person’s response was that he was going to call the police if he says anyone who didn’t belong in the area. I just wonder how long the wait time would have been. I don’t say this to criticize just to make the point that first responders are stretched very thin in situations like this and have to prioritize who gets service. If you live a distance out of town on an isolated piece of property they will get to you when they get to you but it might not be in time.
I should have been paying attention earlier in the cycle. I knew the storm was coming but thought, since we are in the mountains, that it would not affect us. Bad mistake. I never thought I suffered from familiarity bias but I have learned how wrong I was.
Finally, I realized how lucky I was to have been at home at the time of the storm. As I mentioned earlier, I work from my office in another state on a regular basis. If I had been there, things could have been much different. First, there is the distance. It is 247 miles door to door from my house to my office. Second, many roads on all of the routes I would have taken back home were blocked. Both bridges and, in some cases, the roads themselves were gone.
While I always have a get-home bag, I’m not sure how that whole thing would have worked. The National Guard started preventing people from coming into the area in an effort to limit looting and I wonder if they would have allowed me to come in, even though my driver’s license shows my address.
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