Hurricane Ike – 8: What does it sound like to be without electricity?

We lost power here at 8:00 Friday evening. Many people already had generators running. Even after the wind died down on Saturday morning there was no quiet. The sound of the “rushing mighty wind” has been replaced by the groan of generators. Jackie and I love camping, so we are not strangers to the sound of generators, but what we have here are not RV generators. My next door neighbor has an old mobile welding machine sitting outside his garage (and therefore, outside one of the windows of our house). It is very loud. Across the street a worksite generator is running just about all the time. Across the back fence another construction type of generator is running. Sitting outside is not a peaceful experience! I’m not opposed to this, and I’m not complaining, but the noise is somewhat unexpected. I have a generator of my own. However it’s a very small Honda job that will run, at most two appliances at a time. Basically, it’s designed to keep the batteries on our camper charged. It’s made for RVing and therefore is campground friendly. The noise is so loud here that I can’t prove it, but I don’t think it can be heard beyond my front yard. I only run it an hour or so a day anyway. One more comment…sometime in the early morning many of the generators run out of fuel. One by one they shut down and by 5:00 or so it becomes amazingly still. Of course, having slept all night with all the racket, the silence wakes us up!

Lots of photos here.