Be Prepared by keeping a flashlight and batteries on hand.
Important items to keep ready:
- Flashlight and full batteries.
- Battery-powered radio.
- Battery-powered or wind-up clock.
- Emergency telephone numbers, including the number of your electric company to report outages.
- A cord telephone to notify your electric company of the outage.
-Buy devices with built in surge protection or battery-powered back-up; or use surge protectors or arresters in order to protect your appliances. -Keep sensitive equipment such as computers away from circuits that may fluctuate when a major appliance is started, such as a refrigerator or air conditioner, by plugging them into a seperate grounded circuit. -Lighting arresters installed at your main circuit panel are a good consideration as well.
Keep the refrigerator closed during a power outage.
- In the event of an outage,stay away from downed power lines and warn others to do the same. Report downed lines to your local eletric company.
- Turn off all appliances including your furnace, air conditioner, water heater, and water pump. Leave only one lamp on so you know when power has been restored. This way, you can avoid a circuit overload and another outage that may result when all of the appliances recieve power at once.
- Keep freezer and refrigerator doors closed. In a full freezer, food will stay frozen for 1 to 2 days if the door is kept closed. In a half full freezer, food generally stays frozen for about a day.
- On a hot day, close your blinds and drapes on the sunny side of your house. Also, to stay cool drink plenty of water, take your pets to a cool location such as a basements,and go to an air-conditioned civic center, mall, or library if necessary.If you have any health-related questions, don't hesitate to consult your local physician.
Electric Companies work to restore power quickly.
- All eletric companies have a detailed plan to restore power quickly after an outage. Usually, the first step, to prevent injury and fires, is to make sure power is no longer running to downed lines. Then, power restoration process is based of priorities:
- First repaired are the transmission lines and distribution substations. They are the most important lines that carry power from generating plants to a large number of customers over a wide area.
- Next, companies restore power to critical and important community services, such as hospitals, police and fire stations, and communication facilities.
- Then, companies restore power to as many people as possible as soon as possible.Then the restoration process is systematic; restoring neighborhoods, industries, and companies, and then individual residence and small groups until full restoration is complete.
For more information visit the Red Cross' website.
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