This is a little addendum to my earlier preparedness post.

I saw on the news yesterday a story about an older lady of modest means who had a local power outage. No big deal right? Well the time her power would come back on kept getting pushed back by the electric provider until it was almost two days. Not only did she loose hundreds of dollars worth of food from her refrigerator/freezer but her insulin. Bad mojo for a diabetic. A little inverter/generator, and I mean itty bitty, along with a gallon or so of fuel would have solved her problem with refrigeration. Old folks that need refrigerated drugs, or C-Pap equipment are vulnerable to this sort of thing and a few hundred dollars for a backup power solution to keep the food (and insulin) cold will pay for itself with the first use.

Where I live the State has "Sales Tax Holidays" for things like school supplies and emergency preparedness items. Among the tax free preparedness items are small generators, I believe the limit is 4,000 or so cranking watts which is much more than this poor lady would have needed.