There’s a good chunk of bad weather swirling across the U.S. now and over the coming week. As I write this on Wednesday evening, more than 700,000 people are without power in Washington State because of the bomb cyclone off the coast that may bring up to 20 inches of rain. There is also the threat of cold and snow across the northern half of the country into the Ohio Valley. Forecasters expect bad weather to disrupt Thanksgiving travel plans for many.
If you have not yet transitioned over to the winter version of your vehicle survival kit, now would be the time to do so. Be sure to include blankets, warm clothing, and plenty of snacks in case you are trapped in your car. Water is important also, but you may have to add it right before you depart so it does not freeze in your parked car.
Here on the homestead, we are expecting snow, or worse, Thursday and Friday. “Worse” means snow with high winds that can take down trees and power lines. I feel like I have been there, done that.
One downside about living on a mountain is that there are no weather predictions for our altitude. We have to look at the weather forecast for the nearest towns and extrapolate. A good rule of thumb is every 1,000 feet higher is 3°F colder, but we lack a similar rule for precipitation and fog. Sometimes a forecast will refer to snow above 3,000 feet or predict that the snow line is at 3,500 feet, but that is as rare as it is accurate.
I used to shake off weather predictions. So what if the snow leaves us trapped up here for a week? After underestimating Helene, I am taking storm warnings more seriously.
Now versus Then
I feel better prepared for this storm than I was for Helene. For example:
I have 12 unopened bags of chicken feed, twice what I had prior to Helene. We would have run out our chickenfeed by now if I had been stuck on the property until January as some predicted.
I have 50 gallons of gasoline, twice what I had before, and a new, more powerful generator.
We have Starlink now, and it includes a function to melt the snow off the receiver. So we should not lose the internet.
Our solar power system is fully operational. Before Helene, half the panels were out. Of course, solar panels don’t produce any power when they are under a few inches of snow, but I am not planning to climb up there and clean them off. I’ll wait until it melts.
I have set our whole-house batteries to retain a 90 percent state-of-charge while the grid is connected. This will give us 24-hours of stored power; more if we are careful to conserve electricity should the grid go down.
Coincidentally, we have an electrician scheduled to arrive a few days after the storm, just like last time. After Helene, the solar power service folks couldn’t make it here because the bridges and roads were out. Hopefully, this guy has four-wheel drive and doesn’t call off due to the weather. He is scheduled to install a whole-house surge protector and add EMP protection between the solar panels and inverter. He will also optimize our generator set up.
I also have new, more rugged all-terrain tires on my truck. They are not snow tires, but they should grip the snow and mud better than the highway tires that came with the truck.
Low Inventory
We are low on fresh food because we shop once a week or less, and fresh food doesn’t last. I offered to run out and pick a few things up, but my wife declined. We are stocking more canned fruits than we used to, so we should be better off than we were after Helene.
Had we not been able to restock a few weeks after Helene, we would have run out of cheese a week ago and bacon well before that. I now have four pounds of bacon in the freezer. We also have two or three #10 cans of cheese, but it is the bright orange cheese powder I associate with boxes of macaroni and cheese. In other words, it’s not the good stuff. While they do offer freeze dried shredded cheese, I have not purchased any because of the high cost per pound. Maybe next year.
Getting Ready
Just as we took things off the deck and flipped the table upside down so it would not slide around prior to Helene, we made some preps for the coming winter storm. This included draining the hoses and putting them away, winterizing and parking the lawn mower under cover, tarping the log splitter, bringing in a large supply of firewood, and ensuring one outdoor firewood pile is tarped so it won’t become covered in snow and we need to replenish our supply.
I also gave the chickens three days’ worth of food, including some they can eat without leaving their coop. If it gets into the mid-20s at night, I’ll have to break the ice out of their water every morning. Ah, the good old days of winter.
Still, I can’t complain if our first blast of winter weather is in the later third of November. We had our first snowfall in October, but it’s been a warm fall.
The Ford is Back
We’ve been getting rain before the snow, and it has turned our new “land bridge” back into a ford. Besides the increased volume of water in the creek, many pounds of leaves and silt have been carried downstream and packed in among the rocks they poured into our mini-gorge to create the land bridge. This has plugged the holes and causes the water to run over the pile of rocks and gravel rather than through it. This has already eroded part of road surface. We are monitoring it to ensure we can continue to drive across it. So far, so good.
It looks like we are back to having a stream you have to ford to get to our house. I’m not unhappy about that because the ford helps keep out the tourists and “looky Lous” who like to drive up and down the back roads exploring.
The nice thing about snow is it melts slowly, meaning we do not expect flood conditions.
Thursday Afternoon Update: We have already had one power outage due to high winds, but they got power restored in just a few hours. Lights continue to blink occasionally, leading us to believe more outages are likely. Meanwhile, we are taking it easy and enjoying the heat radiating from our wood stove.
While the utility has made full repairs after Helene, their post-repair cleanup effort has not yet reached us. As a result, we have leaning trees and trees that broke in half near power lines, plus parts of poles still hanging from wires. The fear is that these hazards may contribute to new outages during this storm.
