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Hot Springs Ready: Winter Power Outage Safety

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When the lights go out and the temperature doesn’t

A summer outage is a different clock, not an easier one, and a winter outage is the one this post is about. The house starts giving up heat the moment the furnace stops, and how long you stay comfortable depends almost entirely on what you did before the power went off. Most of winter power outage safety is settled before the lights go out.

Mountain outages also tend to run long. Ice brings down limbs, limbs bring down lines, and crews have to reach those lines on roads that are themselves iced over. French Broad EMC serves Madison County along with parts of Buncombe, Yancey and Mitchell counties and two counties in Tennessee, which is a lot of line miles through steep country. Plan on the possibility of a day or more, not a couple of hours, and the shorter outages will feel easy.

Heat one room, not the whole house

Pick a room before winter, not during the outage. An interior room with few windows, on the ground floor, ideally one with a wood stove or fireplace if you have a safe one. Close the doors to everywhere else. Hang a blanket over a doorway that has no door. Put towels along the bottom of exterior doors.

Then move the household into it. Sleeping bags on the floor of one warm room beat four cold bedrooms, and body heat in a small space is real heat. Layers work better than one heavy coat, and a hat indoors is not silly. Head, hands and feet are what get cold first, and they are the cheapest parts to cover.

If you plan to lean on a fireplace or wood stove, have it inspected before the season starts. Our post on preparing your home for winter storms explains why that matters more than people think. A chimney fire during an ice storm, with the road closed, is the situation everyone wants to avoid.

Carbon monoxide is what actually hurts people

Before the comfort advice goes any further, this part.

Every year, people survive the storm and are hurt by the way they tried to stay warm during it. Carbon monoxide has no smell and no color, and the early symptoms, headache and dizziness and nausea, are easy to mistake for being tired and cold. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidance is direct on this.

Never bring a generator, camp stove, charcoal grill or gas grill inside. Not the house, not the basement, not the garage, not an enclosed porch, not the crawl space. A cracked garage door does not make a garage safe.

Never heat a house with a gas cooking stove or oven.

Put a battery-powered or battery-backup carbon monoxide detector near every sleeping area, which is where the CDC says they belong, and check the batteries the same weekend you set the clocks back. If the alarm sounds, get everyone outside into fresh air first, then call for help from outside.

Generators and fuel

The CDC is specific about placement: run a portable generator outdoors and more than 20 feet from any window, door or vent, because exhaust drifts back toward the house through the openings you cannot see.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission adds the other rule that gets broken: never plug a generator into a wall outlet to power the house. That is called backfeeding, and it sends current back out the line where utility crews are working. Anything beyond running an appliance off a properly rated extension cord belongs to an electrician and a transfer switch.

Let the generator cool before refueling, and store fuel outside the living space in an approved container.

Keep the pipes from freezing

Protect the pipes the way our post on preparing your home for winter storms describes: let the exposed faucet drip, open the cabinet doors under the sinks, and if you leave the house, set the thermostat no lower than 55 degrees. A trickle of moving water is cheaper than a burst line.

Know where your main water shutoff is, and make sure at least one other person in the house knows too. Learning that in the dark, while water is coming through the ceiling, is a bad way to learn it.

If you are on a well, remember that no power means no pump. Fill the bathtub and every clean container you own before the storm arrives, not after. That water covers flushing and washing, which is most of what you will actually miss.

FoodSafety.gov publishes the numbers worth memorizing during an outage, and they only hold if you keep the doors shut.

  • A closed refrigerator keeps food safe for about 4 hours.
  • A full freezer holds temperature for about 48 hours.
  • A freezer half full holds for about 24 hours.
  • Throw out any perishable food that has been above 40 degrees for 2 hours or more.

Buy an inexpensive appliance thermometer for the fridge and one for the freezer, and you can stop guessing. A related trick: freeze a cup of water solid, set a coin on top, and leave it in the freezer. If you come home to the coin at the bottom of the cup, the freezer thawed and refroze while you were gone, and the food is not safe no matter how solid it looks now.

Know what the National Weather Service is actually telling you

If you learned these as wind chill products, those names were retired. Wind Chill Advisory, Wind Chill Warning and Wind Chill Watch are gone. What the National Weather Service issues now is a Cold Weather Advisory, an Extreme Cold Watch, or an Extreme Cold Warning.

For Hot Springs, those come from the National Weather Service office in Greenville-Spartanburg, in Greer, South Carolina, which covers Madison County. Winter Storm Watches and Warnings, Winter Weather Advisories and Ice Storm Warnings, that last one meaning a quarter inch of ice accumulation or more, all still carry the names you know.

Here is a step beyond the basics

Decide your leaving point now, while you are warm and thinking clearly.

Write down the condition that means your household stops toughing it out and goes somewhere with heat. It might be an indoor temperature. It might be a number of hours. It might be simply that someone in the house is on medication that needs refrigeration, or uses equipment that needs power, in which case the leaving point is much earlier than you would otherwise pick.

Then write down where you would go, and check now whether that place actually has a generator or a wood stove, because a relative’s house on the same downed line is not a plan. If nowhere on your list works, that is worth knowing on a clear day. FEMA operates a text service for finding open shelters: text SHELTER and your ZIP code to 43362.

The reason to settle this in advance is simple. Cold makes people slow and agreeable to bad ideas. A decision written on paper in October does not care how you feel at two in the morning in January.

Winter power outage safety: what to do this week

Of everything above, the one that takes five minutes and saves the most: find your main water shutoff and show one other person in the house where it is. Do that before the first hard freeze.

The next post in this series is the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Helene, and where the recovery stands now.

Resources mentioned in this post

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