Power went out again on Wednesday 15 June 2022 at around 0925 am. Luckily it came back less than an hour later at around 1015.
Check the Get your household ready for an emergency — Get Ready — Emergency preparedness in New Zealand website for help preparing for emergencies.
A few tips for dealing with power cuts at Waikawa Beach, especially since your pumped rainwater supply probably won’t work:
- keep some bottled water on hand for drinking and for other uses such as hand washing and toilet flushing. The website linked above says: “Water for three days or more — make sure you have at least nine litres of water for every person. This will be enough for drinking and basic hygiene.” Don’t forget water for pets.
- to flush the toilet top up the water in the cistern.
- get a couple of solar powered lanterns and keep them in a place where they’ll get sun or daylight every day so they stay charged.
- get a couple of torches that you can charge and recharge via USB. Check out bike lights for small but bright torches.
- are you set up to cook even if the power’s off? A BBQ would work or a woodburner with cooktop. If you have a gas cooktop remember you can light it with a match. Keep matches on hand.
- do you know how to open your garage door without a remote?
- keep a charged up powerbank handy for recharging your phone.
- know your equipment — how does it respond to a power outage? At our place we have to reset the towel rail every time the power goes off. We also learned the expensive way to reset the oven clock after a powercut (or else the oven and cooktop don’t work). Are there things you need to reset?
- what about heating? If you depend on electricity to be warm, make sure you have some extra blankets handy.
