How many extra batteies are you thinking of carrying and what is your typical attire? If you just want a couple of batteries, I've found one of the easiest things to do is tape a pair together with electrical tape and slip them in my pocket.

FWIW,
Chris.

I'm in a business casual place now. I have stuff in my pockets but they always slide around and make noise bumping together. So far no one has cared about my leatherman wave on my belt (I do put it right beside my cell phone so its somewhat hidden). I have a e-mail pager on the other side clipped on my belt and I'm thinking if I can find a small pouch the side of 2 to 4 AAA's that would clip on my belt it would be small enought it would go unoticed.

Dick Assman was a Canadian guy featured on David Letterman's show for his obviously funny name. David Asman was on Fox with the Petzl.

<< I'm wondering what will be the death toll from the heat or from no AC and or riots and such that may break out. >>

Hey. This ain't Paris, man. Nobody sat in their offices waiting for some "authority" to tell 'em what to do; no one died of heat stroke waiting for some government program to come rescue them; no pompous trades unionist with a bad haircut and a bullhorn told us when to riot. This is North America, man! The New World! We don't wait for authority - we ARE the authority. We don't.......

Oh.

Guess my lithium wore off. Sorry.

Seriously though, that's the first REALLY big story here - what didn't happen. Imagine - the largest city in America, a city who made the middle finger gesture into an art form, a city that gave "attitude" it's attitude - looses the mother's milk of the post-industrial age - power. And what happens? Food Riots? Nope. Wholesale looting? Not that. Massive pillaging? Big zero there. Headquarters of ConEdison stormed? How about Gracie Mansion? Nor even. NYC goes dark, and Dan Rather has a SLOW news night. Imagine. What did happen though, is that New Yorkers, and many others in many other places, for the most part went through this with spirits high, helped out complete strangers who were out of luck, had mass sleep-ins in parks, and generally got on with life!

What we saw was how America (and Canada), post 9/11, now takes on adversity. One person at a time. Our friends in this world should take note; our enemies should be loosing sleep over it.

And the other REALLY big story here? Why, the agony of low battery life, of course. But I think we've already pummeled that expired equine rather well, so my comments are on it are superfluous.


.....CLIFF

To err is human; to really, spectacularly screw up takes technology. Really expensive technology.

Just returned from Wasaga Beach, http://www.wasagabeach.com/ post “Blackout” , doing the family camping thing, was uneventful until listening to the music from the arcade at the beach pounding away at your head, the beer parlours playing rap or house or hip hop , noise is noise when at 4:14 Thursday afternoon it all became quiet. Since California has had rolling blackouts, Canadians are smug and leave worries to other nations until something like this happens. A misspent youth and memories from my single days draw me to this beach, to capture that magic . Now with hair turning white and two kids, my dear wife turning red under the sun, I feel life has been kind. Even the silence pierced the sea gulls cries for a stray pomme frit, only the gentle surf was louder. Determined to lose my headache, I strolled in search of asprin but was met with closed shops and lo even the arcade had dropped its doors. Power failure , that was the word on the street, the beer parlours were still slinging but no lights or sound was made. Ah, sweet relief. A stroll further along the bikini walk was pleasurable knowing the mating rituals are not affected by blackouts, nuclear attack or plague. All the local stores had closed up or having discount sales on ice cream. The gas pumps were also closed, another worry. I had enough chow for a few days. The thought of shark feeding raced through my mind and reduced my estimate. Returning to our blanket, I scanned the channels on our FM band and heard the worse. The entire east coast and Detroit was unpowered. Talk to anyone from Toronto and they will burden the listener with SAR’s , Mad Cow, The Rolling Stones, getting out of the city by their employers generosity and civic holidays. Wasaga Beach remains the great equalizer, as everyone on the beach is equal under the sun. My thoughts return to Santa Cruz, the beach volley ball, the Crows Nest Restaurant, the Marina, a different place sharing the sun. The campsite supper was by coleman lamp and candles, the park lighting and water system dead. I had stashed some water in my cooler for the kids, so I took quick inventory and if things got really bad, I would unpack my water filter and refill the bottles from the river. It was also amazing how other campers gather together around a fire and start to relate the news heard on radios since all cell phones had died. Candles were shared, baby food, batteries, harmonicas. We went to bed late, thankful, listening to the CBC most of the night thinking about others who are in true need.

Maybe by getting a new case for either your phone or Wave you could find a place to keep the batteries without adding another pouch, if you are going for descrete. Something like this , for example from Nite-Ize. I've never seen this product in person, however, and it looks like it might be a little bulky. I don't know of one, but maybe someone makes something along this line for a leatherman.

FWIW,
Chris.

Here's an article from the Philadelphia Inquirer that talks about what might happen if the lights hadn't come back on.

What would happen if power went out - and stayed out?

Probably nothing new in the article to most of the people here, but it did have an interesting take on why there wasn't any looting this time.

I found a link to these little pouches in another post on this site, and have been very happy with them. They hold 4 AA,'s or 3 CR123A's plus a pill box with extra bulb. They have a velcro strap on the back so you can attach to belt, backpack strap, etc. Not the absolute best quality around, but they hold up pretty well.

http://www.drifterbag.com/battery.htm

I thought I would post my experience and a quick summary of what worked and what didn't. We didn't have power for 40 hours. First, thanks to Doug and Chris (and others) for creating a very useful forum that is not 'survivalist' in nature. The blackout (or should it be 'Blackout') was a very useful reminder that many 'situations' occur in day-to-day life and this is often what one needs to respond to, be it snowstorm, blackouts or floods.

Here are some general observations (based on Toronto). People are great (mostly)! Lots of people took the time to help direct traffic, make room for emergency services, hand out water to people walking home, visit and check with elderly neighbours, create the 'Mother of All BBQs', provide updates to neigbours, help sipon gas, etc.

Some people suck - those that decided to rob stores and, in my mind, the even more evil gas station owners that decided to jack prices by 30 - 40%.

In this kind of emergency, you (if you are reading this site) will be the most prepared. Take some time to help out the neighbours - this isn't the time to pull the gun and guard the hideout.

Some thoughts on What worked:

1. Have your car(s) filled with gas and have some spare gas (with fuel stabilizer) handy. Major problems with people who wanted to get out of town but couldn't. Thankfully my wife had filled our truck, car had some gas and a spare 5gal in my bike - keep tanks at least 1/2 full. Buy a proper sipon system (about $5), Toronto had over 20 people taken to hosp from sucking in fuel (likely with their garden hose = a really big gulp of gas) - don't be an idiot, EMS is already way too busy!

2. Have a battery powered/solar/wind-up radio. Many people had no idea of what was happening. My solar/wind-up Freeplay was FANTASTIC and saved having to run back to the car every 5 min. As others have noted, many stations off the air for some time

3. LED flashlights are very useful. Small = have them with me, didn't have ot worry about batteries and just the right amount of light for the day-to-day tasks (like taking a pee, looking for the cooler, etc). We had 'bigger' lights (eg SureFire), but not critical for most stuff. Lots of people stuck underground in the subway - hot and dark = nice to have a light

4. Some form of lantern would be helpful. We had Coleman, which we really didn't need. I want to buy/build 2-3 LED lanterns that run off large batteries. We also had glow sticks (which we didn't use - see below), which would have been helpful

5. Water. You need it. You really need it if you are in an Apartment. While experience varied, many apt dwellers had no water. We had 60l in 'water cooler' style containers and probably ~40l in bottles, etc (before hitting the wine collection!). We also have a very good water filter from camping. As I left work, I reached into my drawer and grabbed 2 500ml water bottles to take with me. If you don't need it, the sweaty guy directing traffic does!

6. Ham radio and Lic (kicking myself for not having it with me initially). A net was established from the CN Tower repeater almost instantly and was very useful in getting good data and real-time info on useful information for ME (ie road conditions on road we would be taking to leave town). Very small hand-held unit, AA batteries, AM/FM/TV receive, autopatch to patch into phone system, all EMS freq - great unit that is the size of a pack of smokes

7. Having gear ready to go (food, etc). I chucked these in the truck, added other stuff and we were good to go

8. Batteries are useful, but standardize. I find it quite helpful to have most of my gear standardized on ONE battery type (AA) and buy the big bricks of name brand batteries at Costco. The SureFire is great, but useless once you run out of batteries.

I didn't need it, but I have a good marine deep cycle battery and an inverter that could have been very helpful (lots of power for Ham radio, ability to power lights, etc)

Stuff that didn't work as well:

1. Cell phone. As expected, these are completely useless for communications in emergencies. Many cells seemed to have no power and system was completely overloaded. Don't rely on this in an emergency, you should have some $$ for pay phones and see HAM RADIO above!

2. Having emergency kits that I packed many moons ago with no idea what was in them, or where critical things were (...now where is that radio). Keep lists posted to the packs with contents. This is the reason we didn't use the glow sticks

3. Having no gas in the BBQ tank

After preparing our stuff, making sure all was ok, helping some neighbours we spent the night in the back yard drinking wine with neighbours and looking at the best night sky I have ever seen in Toronto (including Mars) and then 'bugged-out' the next AM for a location with power (with all of our emergency gear).

I hope this helps

I happened to be visiting family in Toronto last week, and when the power outage occurred I was on the train from Toronto to Ottawa to visit my brother. We thought we were hard done by when we found out that the train had to travel slowly (no power for the r/y X'ing signals, so the train had to go slow every time it came to a road). The train was almost 2 hours late getting to Ottawa, on what is normally a 5-hour trip. Later, I came to realise we were among the lucky ones, when we saw how it had affected air travel and buses.

Arrived in Ottawa after dark - very weird, walking through the train station with only a couple of emergency lights. Kicking myself because I had left my key-ring with the Photon flashlight on it at my sister's place in T.O. Tried to phone my brother but none of the payphones were working - I found out later that I could have made a collect call but didn't realise it at the time. Took a cab to my brother's house in the dark, again very weird driving through the dark and treating all intersections as 4-way stops. I don't know if this happened elsewhere but every driver in Ottawa just seemed to do it like they'd been trained that way. My brother was home waiting for me when I arrived, we sat around talking for a while, then went for a walk around the neighbourhood. Power came back on about midnight, we watched the news, then I went to bed about 1 a.m. Power went out as I was going to bed, didn't come back on until about 5 a.m. when it woke me up. It was on for a while, then went back out, came on again briefly, then was out for most of the rest of the day.

All in all, I think we got off very lightly. Our water kept running and the power came back relatively quickly. We did start to get into the mindset of doing things as soon as the power came on, because after it failed the third or fourth time, we clued in that it could go out again at any minute.

I didn't remember until the second day that I had my Altoid tin in the bag for my laptop, and there was another Photon inside - I took that out and hooked it to my (other) keychain, but I never had to use it.

I must confess, I used to think all the discussions on this board about "urban survival" were a little bit over the top. I have now seen the light - ironically <img src="images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

I never got around to putting my Altoids tin back together after it got ripped apart by airport security personnel a couple of months ago. I hadn't realised how much I had gotten used to carrying a Photon on my keychain until I needed it and didn't have it. Also, I had debated bringing my Ham radio with me and had decided against it because I didn't expect to use it and didn't want to carry the added weight. I'm seriously thinking about buying a 2m handheld now.

I think the people who were worst affected were probably the people who "put all their eggs in one basket". The ones who needed electricity for *everything*, including water.

For me, the blackout never got to the point of being even an annoyance - it was more a mini-adventure than anything. As we were right across the river from Quebec, which had power, I knew that we could always fill up with gas and, if necessary, propane, albeit at greatly inflated prices, but we never had to. I know that for many others, it was very serious.

With the number of disasters happening concurrently - SARS, mad cow disease, the prolonged droughts in the prairies, the killer heat wave in Europe, the forest fires in BC and southern Alberta, and now the largest blackout in history (at least, if you don't consider the absence of electricity in Iraq and Afghanistan to come under the heading of "power outage"), I think things may be about to get much worse, permanently. Commentators no longer talked about global warming as a theory, they spoke of it as an established fact. It's frightening to think that we may already have passed the point of no return, and that nothing we do can avert global environmental catastrophe.

A few years ago, I would have dismissed such speculation as wacko conspiracy theories; now, I'm more than ever convinced that all these disasters are Mother Nature's way of saying "Geez! Take a hint, you morons!" <img src="images/graemlins/blush.gif" alt="" />