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 With no electricity, Aspen Dvorak and Kendall Karnatz cook eggs over candles. They later used the same setup to make toast for a nice hot breakfast. |
Jeff Van Nortwick left his home on Riverview Shores west of North Bend early Wednesday morning, hoping to get to work in Lincoln before the storm him. Expecting the worst, he booked a hotel for that night.
His wife Karrie and two daughters hunkered down at home. Jeff made it home Thursday night to find his family tired of sandwiches. That night they left for Karrie’s brother’s house in Omaha to ride out the outage.
“Without water, and the ability to flush toilets and that kind of stuff, you’re kind of (out of luck),” Jeff Van Nortwick said. “If we had water, we could probably run off a generator and heat the place enough and get by for a few more days.”
Last Wednesday when D.J. Mottl was able to get out of his house, he found power poles snapped off and blocking the county road in both directions from his house on County Road R east of North Bend.
With no power, they used a generator to take turns running the refrigerator, freezer and a blower on a propane heater.
“It’s kind of like being back in the pioneer days,” Mottl said. “You go back to survival mode. We’ve got a couple pigs in the barn we’ve been melting snow to water.”
In North Bend Kerri Chvatal and her family grilled hamburgers and hot dogs in the garage. The grill helped warm the garage, but in the house there was no such heat source. Sweatshirts and blankets would have to do, as would analog entertainment.
“We did lots of activities that we wouldn’t typically do,” Chvatal said. “The games typically get shoved back on a shelf, and these are the times we pull them out. It was very fun to get off electronics for a while.”
When Jeff Alderson, owner of the North Bend Mini Mart, realized his store was out of power, he knew his coolers and freezers would hold temperatures for eight or nine hours.
Wednesday evening he and a crew of about five spent an hour and a half packing all the perishable items into insulated totes and put them in a trailer outside, where the 17 degree night air would keep them cold.
The outdoor solution held pretty well, though he did lose a few items like ice cream.
Alderson got on the phone and located a large generator in Omaha he could rent that would power the whole store.
“It was maybe one of a couple left around the state,” he said. “I called early and fast.”
Thursday morning, the Mini Mart staff moved everything they had put outside the night before back into place in the store before the temperature got too warm outside.
“It was labor intensive,” Alderson said, “and we lost a bit, but it could have been a lot worse. If I hadn’t gotten the generator, I would have lost everything. ”
The store lost about a half day Thursday while the generator was set up, but business continued.
“If I was at the store and people walked in, we were open,” Alderson said. “We were just working out of a cash drawer and a calculator.”
Kris Dvorak’s house on Foothill Road northeast of North Bend hovered between 50 and 52 degrees. They had a generator, but it was used for more important things.
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