Sorry to leave you all hanging last week, I was in prep mode for what would turn out to be a National Emergency. If you’re new around these parts, hi, my name is Charlie, I live in Nashville, Tennessee. If you’ve paying to the news at all in the last week you’ll know that we got destroyed with a historic ice storm, the repercussions of which a lot of the city is still actively dealing with. I want to let you in on what our experience was like during this & walk you through the last week, & a few days prior, of my life here.
The first thing I want to make abundantly clear before we begin is how grateful I am that things turned out the way they did for Evan & I. We (well, I) went into this preparing for the worst & did the best with that as I think I could. We are also incredibly fortunate to be back with electricity, hopefully that continues going forward, but we are continuing to live with the possibility of that not being the case. I am also grateful to have the financial means to prepare & adapt as this storm became apparent, during, & after the fact. A lot of what happened , & the cards that fell into place, seem a lot like divine providence. I’m grateful to the linemen who are still out working to restore people’s power. I’m grateful to the community of Nashville who have really stepped up to help & take care of one another in this time & the friends of ours that checked in insistently on us & offered up warm places for us to stay, should we have chosen to leave our house. So many in this city are still in the cold & the dark & my heart goes out to them. We got about half of what you all have been dealing with & I fear it will be something I will need to work through psychologically for the next bit of time.
The Week Before
Originally the forecast for us just said snow, a lot of snow, 12-16 inches, but still just snow. Manageable. As the week went on & the models continued to update it became apparent that the initial model was shifting north & that we would end up getting only a couple inches of snow, some sleet, & a whole lot of freezing rain. Then it became apparent that we would be THE center of the freezing rain at its worst. This is where the preparation started.
The first steps were weather sealing & preparing for the possibility of us losing power. Original projections said that we would only get about half an inch of accumulated freezing rain, of which they thought power outages would be sporadic & manageable. We invested in a bunch of weather stripping to reseal our windows & doors from the drafts, some pipe wraps to cut in half & use to seal the garage door, & some extension cords to plug into the back of the car, an electric truck that I had the privilege of attaining back in November. We searched fruitlessly for a generator, as did most of the city, but as indicated, came up dry there.
We bumped the heat in the house up to a consistent 75º (usually set to around 68º), charged the truck up to 100% (you typically only charge up to 80%), bumped the heater in my reef tank up to 80º (typically set to 78º), & stocked up on a myriad of food that we could eat without needing to cook it or heat it, that we could leave out without fear of it spoiling. We backed the truck up to right up against the garage door, ran two 100 foot extension cords from the bed, under the garage door, & through the garage entrance into the house. We covered all the sensitive outdoor plants in burlap sacks so as to protect them from the frost. And lastly, we made sure everything was charged all the way up; phones, tablets, laptops, battery backups, power tool batteries that we had an inverter for, & a back up battery pack for our wifi router (more on that later). We pulled stashes of potable water as well, just incase, for some reason, we couldn’t get water. Then we waited.
Our main concern with the power going out was our reef tank. I have a 185 gallon reef tank that, over the more than a decade of owning it, has accumulated probably thousands of dollars worth of coral, fish, & invertebrates. It’s a delicate ecosystem that has to stay within 75 & 80º, requires intensive lighting, & has internal chemistry that is dependent upon filters & pumps & rock & vegetation. It’s honestly a really great thing to own in the event of a sub-freezing power outage……..In addition to it, we have two cats, a dog, & a very large number of tropical house plants…like in the high 100s, most of which you aren’t supposed to let get into sub-50º temperatures. Really a recipe for disaster over here in this climate where it’s cold half of the year.
Sunday
We lost power at around 4:45 AM on Sunday. We accepted it for what it was, got up & put blankets over the tank & went back to bed to deal with the outage at a more proper time of morning. We’d already insulated the house & bumped the temperature, the only thing we could do at this point was preserve it the best we could.
We got up around 9 AM to continue our tasks. I moved the heater from the sump tank below the main aquarium, where the filters & such sit, into the main tank & plugged it into the main extension cord from the truck. What we hadn’t anticipated happening was that our cellular service also went out. Fortunately I had plugged in & set up the wifi back up the day prior! I told you it’d come back up. The battery back up actually operates on a separate modem & uses cellular to provide a weaker, but still reliable wifi signal. The battery pack for it lasts around 8 hours on a full charge. We kept it charged consistently using the power inverter & the power tool batteries.
Around 11 AM we were given a false hope. Our power sputtered on. It did so for only about a minute before there was a loud pop & we were once again without.
We spent most of the day doing little things around the house to keep things safe or warm in the slightest. We moved our nicer instruments to the primary bedroom where we were running a space heater off the truck, we ran a small space heater in the garage to help protect the pipes from freezing, we ate cereal, jerky, rice cakes, chips, granola bars, fruit, etc. in an attempt to avoid opening the fridge/freezer & I think by the evening we had only lost about 10º of heat with the fish tank holding strong.
We pulled most of the food we wanted to save from our fridge & put it in coolers outside. At one point in the evening Evan tried to heat a pitcher of vegetable broth with a candle warmer which took about an hour to get up to even the most lukewarm of temperatures. On his second batch, just before it got up to temperature, the cats came running through the living room, caught ahold of the cable for the warmer in the dark, & sent soup flying across the living room. This would be the first of several crash outs from the outage.
With the tank up to temp at night we opted to use the extension plug for a heated blanket which we layered under about two others on the bed & ran until we were well & toasty. At which point we unplugged the blanket & plugged the fish tank heater back in.
Our last saving grace of the day was finding that our gas water heater was still heating water, so we each took a long bath to soak out the cold from our bones before bed.
Monday
When we woke up Monday morning, now 24+ hours without power, the temperature in the house was sitting in the low 50s. Clearly the single space heater wasn’t going to cut it. Not that I really ever thought it would. Problem number one. Additionally, I opened up the front of the aquarium to check on things to find many a number of the fish & invertebrates dead despite the temperature consistency. Problem number two.
For problem one we needed to find a heating solution. There was a blatant one staring us in the face that we didn’t want to use, but that ended up being our only real option. Our gas fireplaces.
We have two ventless gas fireplaces in our house; one in the primary that passes between the bedroom & the bath & one in the living room. We don’t like to run them because they make the house have a kerosene smell, apparently that’s to be expected. You’re also not supposed to run them for longer than an hour to three at a time. Our main concern with them was the carbon monoxide that they put off, while it may be small amounts, it still is there & builds up over time. The other side of that coin is that while we occasionally use the bedroom one, & we cleaned it prior to the freeze, the one in the living room hadn’t been operational for several years. Around the afternoon that started to not matter.
We began running the bedroom fireplace pretty early in the day. I then went about doing what I could to get the living room one up & running. We cleaned it out, dusted it, & did the most tuning we could possibly do ourselves. Lowe & behold, I got it working. Though not without us both being incredibly wary of its existence.
Problem two was an oversight problem on my own part. After diving into the internet about saving your reef tank from a winter power outage, the first thing that came up was using a bubbler to keep oxygen flowing as the creatures in the tank will use up the majority of the oxygen in the water fairly quickly. Everything in my tank that died suffocated. I immediately shifted the tank plan.
My first course of action was to plug in a bubbler. I have a spare one that I keep in my car in the event that I pick up some fish from a shop in St. Louis on the way home from visiting my parents in KC. I plugged it into the one of the three outlets on the end of the extension cord, keeping the heater in as well. Then I started thinking about the nitrate cycle of the tank. Fish & food waste breaks down into nitrate, which then converts to nitrite, which then becomes ammonia, all of which are toxic to fish in varying degrees. Filters help to mitigate & remove these compounds from the water. I then made the executive decision to just relocate all of my efforts to the sump tank & power everything from there, it would allow the water to circulate, heat, & filter. It also made it so I could run my protein skimmer, a filter that uses aeration to catch excess proteins in the water, convert them into foam, & collects them in a cup as the foam rises. Think the foam that accumulates on a beach from the waves. I know it was an unsafe electrical decision, but I plugged all of that into one strip & isolated it on the extension cord. It didn’t overload it, so I guess that was good.
We were really running by the seat of our pants here. Our options were let the house freeze or maybe get carbon monoxide poisoning & die. Then the other side of that was risk starting a fire or lose the fish tank. I chose the riskier options on either hand making sure to have our battery operated carbon monoxide detector running & keeping an eye on the electrical.
We went through & pulled all of our stuff from the garage freezers, which amazingly still had full solid ice, & moved them outdoors in coolers as well.
This was also definitely the day our mental health started to deteriorate. I think Evan & I both did a lot of sitting around in layers, staring. We weren’t talking or watching things or reading or anything, it was too cold to. All we did was sit & stare & eat & problem solve as the problems arose. We took midday showers to keep warm & another in the evening.
By the time we closed out the night the temperature in the house was holding at around 55º. We both took a hydroxyzine (we’re prescribed, don’t worry) to help to cope with the anxiety of it all & began to wonder the same thing. Whether or not the tightness in our chests, the lightheadedness, the slight headache, the sleepiness, was from the drug neither of us had taken in a minute, or the fumes from the fireplaces. The fireplaces were turned off & we tucked in early for the night.
Tuesday
I woke Tuesday very stressed. At this point we were 48 hours in & the temperature in the house had dropped ten degrees overnight, putting us at 45º & the only option we had to reheat was the fireplaces that both of us were growing more & more leery of by the minute. Without much other option, they were turned back on.
I was also growing concerned about my corals. Corals are organisms that contain both a plant & an animal aspect & they have to photosynthesize to stay alive. The small amount of light from the windows doesn’t cut it either. I decided to plug a second strip in & run the lights…don’t try this at home kids.
As the morning crept into afternoon it became apparent that we were in trouble. Evan was mid crash out on the couch next to the fire when I walked down the stairs to find myself increasingly out of breath. I asked him if he was having the same issue, he was. We decided we needed to figure out another solution even though the alarm was still reading zero parts per million for CO.
Our roads were now thawed enough to get out of the neighborhood & Home Depot down the street had power & was showing available space heaters. That became the plan. Unplug the truck, go to Home Depot, see if they have space heaters & more extension cords for the truck & heat the house that way.
I don’t quite know where, when, or who it was that I saw, but I got a post from a friend on socials about picking up his rental car for his vacation. It clicked. I immediately called up Avis, booked something with four wheel drive & began to formulate a new plan.
Step one. Evan & I take the truck, which was still at 65% charge after being run for 2 days straight, & go to the airport where he’d drop me off & I’d pick up the rental car. Step two. While I was picking up the rental car he’d take the truck to a fast charger & charge it up to at least 80% again. Step three. While he was doing that, I’d take the rental & go to Home Depot for space heaters, extension cords, & maybe a generator (they didn't have any). Step four. We’d meet back up at home at which time we’d plug the other extension cords into the truck, plug the space heaters in off of them & plug the tank in with its lights on running each off their own circuit from the truck. Once that was established we’d start looking for hotels. The plan went off mostly effortlessly. The problem arose when we went to look for hotels.
With around a fourth of Nashville still without power, a lot of the hotels were booked up. Additionally we needed somewhere that would allow Pete to come with us, most of the places we called that had availability only allowed dogs up to 40 lbs, which I think is complete & utter bull. Lastly, most of the hotels that were available were pricey on pricey as the lower options had all been scooped up.
After an hour of calling we ended up getting ahold of Holston House in Downtown Nashville. Normally a fairly expensive stay, they were offering a local discount of around 40-50%. We booked it immediately. We then decided that we needed to test to make sure our plan was going to work, that the house & the tank wouldn’t overload the breaker on the truck & that it would at least hold temperature which was back up in the 50s from the fireplaces. We opted to go grab our first hot meal in 62 hours & come back to check in once we were done.
As soon as we moved the seat protectors for the dog from the truck to the rental our power came back on. As soon as we finished with that task. We were bound to our hotel room for the night already so instead of going to dinner we shifted our attention to packing a bag for the night for both of us & Pete & returning things to being plugged in that needed it, fully preparing for the possibility of the power dipping out again. I returned the plug ins for the fish tank back to the wall with the exception of the heater & the bubbler, which I returned to the main tank just in case.
The hotel was lovely, they gave us complimentary cocktails upon arrival. We got up to the warm room, ordered our first hot meal of a cheeseburger, pot roast, & truffle fries & found ourselves full of gratitude while also being entirely fried from a nervous system point of view. I’d spent the last two & a half days making a lot of the decisions for the two of us, most of which felt like they were potentially putting us in harms way. It was a balancing act of figuring out what was worth the risk & what wasn’t.
Aftermath
We fortunately never lost power again. Naturally we extended the invitation that so many lovely folks extended our way to those still without power all while continuing to prepare for the possibility that we might lose power again. We’re keeping our house at an elevated temperature, we’re keeping the car charged, we’re keeping the tank warmer than usual, we’re staying stocked of dry provisions & making sure batteries are charged.
At its peak there were around 250,000 homes & businesses without power. When ours was restored the number was down to around 140,000. Today, four days later, that number still sits around 60,000 with many of those people seeing no end in sight for this nightmare. The weather here hasn’t gotten above freezing since before the storm & won’t be until next week. Nashville Electric, who has severely dropped the ball for this, is projecting that some people won’t have power for another week still. The mishandling of this disaster on their part has cost people lives, livelihood, & their sanity. It’s completely unacceptable. Some who have gained power have lost it again, others didn’t lose power until Wednesday or Thursday with even more people having lost power today.
The linemen here are not at fault, praise be to them. That blame lands with NES, the Nashville government, & the Tennessee government. They were unprepared, they rely on antiquated technology for our electrical grid, & have done truly very little to help the constituents trapped without power in sub-freezing conditions. Many parts of Nashville look like a tornado went through. Most of our trees are still covered in ice & my fear is once it begins to thaw next week that it’ll knock out more power from the limbs or trees that are frozen aloft that no longer have the ice holding them in place. To say it’s a mess is putting it lightly.
Again, I cannot state how fortunate Evan & I were to have only had to go 62 hours without power. Many people have gone a full week at this point. I pray for those still in the cold & the dark. I pray for those who are out repairing lines & cutting down trees. I pray for this city, but I am amazed by the community that has risen above & beyond here. If you are in Nashville reading this, please stay safe, stay warm, & lean on one another to help or receive help where you can.
Additionally, I’ve linked some resources here from Nashville Scene if you are a local in need.
As Always, Much Love To You All,
-C