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The power started going out across Portland shortly after noon Saturday, Jan. 13, as winds out of the Columbia Gorge gusted to more than 50 miles an hour and sent trees tumbling into power lines. As of 5:30 pm Monday, Jan. 15, more than 22,000 Multnomah County customers still lacked electricity. (More than 150,000 Portland-area households were without electricity on Saturday night.) That meant thousands of people were entering their third day of an indoor campout, with the weather outside barely cracking 20 degrees. On Monday afternoon, WW spoke to two of the power-deprived, both residents of the Montavilla neighborhood. Here are their accounts:
Thom Hines, associate professor of interaction design at Portland State University
We were sitting around enjoying a leisurely Saturday. Around 2 pm, the power went out. We have a hundred-year-old house, so the temperature was noticeably cooler even 20 minutes later. And then we just basically tried to figure out ways to keep our three elderly dogs warm: try to keep huddling them into smaller spaces and bundle all of us up with more and more layers, until finally we all went to bed in the same room, just huddled up and freezing all night.
Berlin is a 20-year-old miniature pinscher; Buddy is a 16-year-old schnauzer poodle, or schnoodle; and Nero is an 11-year-old mutt. We either have friends who already have pets that wouldn’t do well with other dogs coming in, or couldn’t have pets in their place to begin with, or were out of power.
We had some friends in Hood River who were willing to put us up. We tried driving out there Saturday, a couple hours after the power went out. It was so scary and so dangerous that we ended up turning around just after Troutdale.
As soon as the power went out, we tried to report it to PGE. After a couple hours, we got a text message saying that they got our message. Their website still says there’s no estimate when we’ll get our power back and no sign what the cause is. It says they’re investigating.
The first night, we lit candles for light, but it didn’t provide much heat. It was just as many layers as we could fit on our bodies. And then essentially carrying our dogs around in blankets and stuffing them into beds and covering ourselves.
I think it was 35 degrees the following morning. I’ve only been that cold maybe once or twice in my life, but it’s a lot harder with having to take out dogs and they’re walking on thick ice and they’re trying to pee on rugs ‘cause they don’t want to go outside. It was absolute mayhem in there.
We’re currently in the house of friends in Beaverton who have two dogs and two cats of their own. We packed up the car and left around 2 pm Sunday. We weren’t sure how we were going to be able to do any longer than that.
I think the very first lesson is to buy snow chains for our tires. We realize now that if our power goes out, we are absolutely at nature’s whims. We will probably just try to get out of town if we see some terrible weather coming.
Andrea Love, co-owner of Gigantic Brewing
We were just watching something on TV and chatting. Ben, my husband, said to me, “We should probably download a movie on the iPad.” So I had done that, and then the power went. And I was like, Oh well, we have something for later tonight.
It took a while for the house to cool down. But our house is sitting at about 50 degrees now on the main floor. We have a wood stove in the basement so, as compared to other people, we’re doing okay. We’ve just been living in the basement, and I had a crapload of candles and also a weird amount of fairy lights, which has also been very handy. We have battery-operated fairy lights galore.
The dog, Bowie, and the cat, Magnus, are also now cave dwellers of the basement. That’s where we have the wood stove that, funnily enough, we were talking about taking out this past fall and then just didn’t get around to it. And now I don’t think we’ll take it out.
We have a gas stovetop. So we’ve been able to cook. We lucked out, because we had some leftover beef stroganoff on Saturday night, so we heated that up. And the other nice thing is we live in about a 110-year-old house, so it’s got one of those sort of semi-detached garages that’s just all cinder block with no insulation. So we packed all our freezer food into coolers and put it out there and everything has stayed frozen. Tonght I’m gonna make a leak and ouzo lemon chicken dish, because it only needs to be on one pan on your stovetop.
The PGE website doesn’t say anything about timing. We haven’t heard anything. Our neighbor said he heard maybe tomorrow or Wednesday. I was just at the Glisan Fred Meyer. They haven’t heard anything, and you’d think if someone was gonna know, it’d be them.
It’s an inconvenience for sure: sitting in the car to charge your phone, things like that. But otherwise, I feel like we did all right so far. It’s kind of like extreme yurting. You have a lot more food options and you don’t have to share a bathroom with anyone, but it is cold getting out of bed and walking to the bathroom upstairs. You’re like, Ooh. But it’s just like camping in your house.