For the last several months I have been thinking of writing an article for SurvivalBlog, but there have been so many great articles by so many knowledgeable people that I have spent most of my time learning from SurvivalBlog rather than writing for it.

That changed last week (as I write this). I live in North Texas and was impacted by the storms that came through. A lot of news has, rightfully, focused on those areas where tornadoes caused damage – and there were enough of those to keep the news cycles busy. However, the news coverage was virtually non-existent for what impacted my little rural community. It wasn’t the flooding, of which there was plenty. It was the power outages, of which there were over 100,000 reported outage locations with more than 640,000 customers out of service.

So, what was the basically overlooked cause of damage? Straight-line winds…and these aren’t the breezes that dry your clothes on a nice Spring day. Nope, these winds were clocked at 65 miles per hour, gusting to 95 miles per hour. That is Category One hurricane territory. In my area, those winds were sustained for about three hours.

Around me, we had massive oak trees topple all over the place. Limbs from other trees dropped – and some were blown several feet. These got tangled in power lines, snapping them or ripping them down. Power poles and telephone poles were literally snapped off, two feet from the ground, dragging their lines to the ground. Transformers were ruptured and even struck by lightning. Roofs were blown off houses and barns, contributing to the chaos and damage. All in all, it was quite a display of nature’s raw power. Thankfully few people were injured and even fewer fatally. In the last report I heard, only one person had died.

I was fortunate, on my  property. We weren’t directly impacted very much. We have a few limbs down, our pond (around here they are ‘stock tanks’) overflowed, but it drains down a creek, so no real concern for flooding. All-in-all, we were safe, but we were highly inconvenienced. Though we were spared the brunt of the damage, we suffered with everyone else when power went out at about 6:00AM, at the height of the storm.

By the way, hats off to the utility workers who dedicated so much effort to power restoration – it took about three days for the power to be restored in my area of Texas (only about 30 hours for my house), but that is over a landmass about the size of Connecticut, with a population about that of Philadelphia – so we’re talking about a good bit of space between houses and line breaks. For any readers here who do that work or are family members of those folks and support them so they can do it – thank you.

Being in rural Texas, especially over these last several years, we’ve gotten somewhat accustomed to power outages. Usually, though, they have been due to temperature-related events. The deep freeze several years ago knocked out the power. It was out for only about ten hours. A heat wave a few years ago caused usage-based brown-outs and black-outs. They were intermittent for us – an hour here, thirty minutes there. Growing up I was taught that “Texas” came from the Native American (Caddo) word ‘tejas‘, which means “friend”. I’m beginning to think we were lied to in school and it really means ‘the land of bad weather’.

So, the difference between those outages and this was that we were still in the path of danger when the power went out. We had a Severe Thunderstorm Warning, a Flash Flood Warning and were under a Tornado Warning. For those unfamiliar, a ‘Watch’ is when conditions are favorable for something to happen. A ‘Warning” is when it is happening. The National Weather Service was kind enough to let us know that we had a Severe Thunderstorm going on (which our windows verified) and that was leading to Flash Flooding – which we could also see, but were not impacted by. The issue that most concerned us however, was the Tornado Warning. Just at that moment, something happened that I had never had happen during any previous power outages: my cell phone lost signal.

I’ve been involved in telecom on many levels over my career and have a pretty good understanding of how it works, both on the wire-line and wireless sides. (By the way, again for those who are unfamiliar, it takes a lot of wires to make your “wireless” phones work.) So I assume that either the antennae pointing my direction became misaligned or the backhaul from my ‘local’ tower was disrupted. By local, I mean the only tower pointing in my direction, about six miles away and gives spotty service on the best of days. By backhaul, I mean the series of towers, cables, radios, and microwave communications systems that lead from my tower to the central office where data is processed and directed to the next stop on the path to the rest of the world. Whatever the cause, it meant I was in an information void and that is not a good thing when a whirling tube of low pressure destruction is out there, lurking in the semi-dark.

Luckily, there is a reason I hang out on this site – I’m one of the gang. I think about these kinds of things and prepare for them.

What follows is what I did as well as the equipment I used. I mention brand names and models so you can research them and see if they will suit your needs. I am not affiliated with any of the companies in any way other than being a customer – and in the case of the generator, I bought it second-hand, so I’m not even their direct customer.