Since before Hurricane Ike came to town, we lost electricity.  The generator
has been my close friend for about 6 days.

My generator is a 6500 watt 13 hp JEWEL.  It takes 5 gallons of regular
gas and burns at a rate of 12 – 13 hours at a pop.  If you time it right,
you do not have to run out in the middle of the night to re-fill the tank.

I have learned alot about generators these days due to the parents going
kaput on Sunday night.  Theirs just simple wore out from years of use.  It
blew out the muffler, starting blowing oil, and then found copper windings
on the ground.  So, it was pronounced dead and went on a search for another
one.  There was not one generator to be had within 200 miles.  Folks from
Houston were coming up here to find one.

Then, Ace Hardware came up with approx. 200 of them and word spread fast.
They came with Coleman 5000 watt with a subaru engine for $799.00.  It
should of cost $500.00 but hey, in an emergency, you get it.  The cost of
food in the freezer costs more than that.  We unboxed it, put oil and gas
in it, started it up and they had power!

So, we had a new job to do on a daily basis.  Making sure the generators did
not die.  At a cost of $40/day for each generator, the gas was becoming more
and more expensive.  Not only were we running for gas every day, water and
food were being supplied by our little city government.  What a great bunch
of folks.  We even had state troopers come by and check to make sure we had
water and that we were ok.  Should we need anything, just give them a call.
How nice!

On Tuesday, our phones came back on.  The battery supply bank had died and
needed to be recharged, which they did with a generator.  On Wednesday, our
water came back.  They re-tooled the water plant with natural gas with battery
back up.  So electricity is not the reason the water plant goes down in the
future.

Wednesday, we started seeing electric trucks running around the outskirts of
our little town.  Then, we saw the county come down our road with huge bulldozers
and backhoes to move the trees off our road.  That put a little extra step
in our walk.

Thursday, we started seeing trucks congregating in town.  Woohoo!  they are
getting close.  On Friday, the electric trucks were on our road.  Hope is really
abound now.

And on Friday night, a miracle happened.  We got our electricity back at around
7:00 p.m.  We were dancing in the field and thanking those hard working guys
as they checked on us.  What a feeling!  We were the end of the line and they
made it to us.  They were happy they were at the end of the line, we were
happy they made it.  We were all dancing the happy happy joy joy dance in the
middle of the “lit” field.

Tags: ace hardware, acre, alot, banks, batteries, battery supply, city government, coleman, copper, copper windings, cost of food, daily basis, day water, electric, electric trucks, electrical, electricity, electrics, emergencies, engineers, freezer, gas, generators, go, hurricanes, jewel, muffler, natural, natural gas, nature, new job, oil and gas, outskirts, parents, plants, power, state troopers, subaru engine, tank, trees, water, water plant, watts, wind

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 21st, 2008 at 6:28 am and is filed under Green Living. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.