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Your Survival Guy: Out of Gas in Newport: 80% back on the Grid

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Happy Monday Morning, it’s good to be back on the grid with natural gas service restored to 80% of Newport customers. If you were at your home this weekend, then you had several opportunities to intercept a National Grid truck/crew to turn on your gas. I’m guessing the final 20% are vacation homes etc. and could take longer, but the worst is over.

This was a unique outage. There are three towns comprising Aquidneck Island: Newport, Middletown, and Portsmouth. Newport had 6,400 outages (not all homes/hotels were impacted because they pull from a different gas line), Middletown 350. If you had friends or family in one of these towns or had a hotel room, you had a place to go.

But, had this been an island-wide emergency, I believe our best course of action would have been to evacuate off island. A natural gas outage is a different problem than a power outage. When there’s no gas, it’s extremely difficult to operate comfortably with space heaters and no hot water. Food would be harder to come by at some point as all business would be impacted. Then there’s the problem of who’s going to watch your house if you leave. Not an easy problem to solve.

A few things to keep in mind.

  • Always have enough water and food to last at least a few days.
  • Have cash on hand in case you need to evacuate. It saves you from having to stop at an ATM, and cash is quick to use in any transaction.
  • Always keep your cars full of gasoline.

You just don’t know what you’ll need to do until the problem is resolved. There’s never any downside to being prepared.

For more on surviving through the Newport gas outage, read:

Originally posted on Your Survival Guy. 

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E.J. Smith

Editor-in-Chief
E.J. Smith is Founder of YourSurvivalGuy.com, Managing Director at Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd., a Managing Editor of Richardcyoung.com, and Editor-in-Chief of Youngresearch.com. E.J. graduated from Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, with a B.S. in finance and investments. In 1995, E.J. began his investment career at Fidelity Investments in Boston before joining Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd. in 1998. E.J. has trained at Sig Sauer Academy in Epping, NH. His first drum set was a 5-piece Slingerland with Zilldjians. He grew-up worshiping Neil Peart of the band Rush, and loves the song Tom Sawyer—the name of his family’s boat, a Grady-White Canyon 306. He grew up in Mattapoisett, MA, an idyllic small town on the water near Cape Cod. He spends time in Newport, RI and Bartlett, NH—both as far away from Wall Street as one could mentally get. The Newport office is on a quiet, tree lined street not far from the harbor and the log cabin in Bartlett, NH, the “Live Free or Die” state, sits on the edge of the White Mountain National Forest. He enjoys spending time in Key West and Paris. Please get in touch with E.J. at ejsmith@youngresearch.com.