Monday 08/22/2022
I woke up at 6 as usual but immediately knew, without even putting my glasses on, that the power was off. There are a couple of things on my desk with pilot lights, quite bright ones when my eyes are dark-adapted, and they were off. Stepping into the bathroom, the little blue night-light was also off.
I put on clothes and went out to explore. Met Paul, another resident, and we exchanged notes. All the houses outside were dark as far as Middlefield, two blocks over, and for a couple of blocks the other way.
I was pleasantly impressed with how many lights were working, presumably from the emergency generator in the basement. All the halls were lit well enough, and the lounge and dining room on each floor. And the hallways through the basement to the garage, as I found out later. The staff coped very well indeed. Kitchen staff apparently had enough power for refrigerators and some heating, because they served a cafeteria-style breakfast, lunch and dinner. The Wi-Fi worked! And they put out status emails every couple of hours all day. We were not to use water, as the pump didn’t have power to get water above the 5th floor. The main elevators were not powered, but the one freight elevator was up. I ended up climbing to 6 twice during the day.
I went away to FOPAL for my usual Monday, spending 2 and a half hours on 8 boxes of books. Then back home. Around 2pm a staff crew came around to all floors above 5th, to manually flush toilets. They had a big plastic garbage cart filled with water, and a bucket, and would come in and flush the toilet with a bucketful of water.
Craig organized the 6th floor for a picnic. We picked up our hot dogs or hamburgers in the dining room and brought them back to our floor dining room. We were sitting around finishing up when at about 6:14, the power came back on. Two people were up at 4am and had no power, so that was a 14-hour outage.
Codgerville 