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.