Both home and business without power

On Wednesday, December 17th, at 10am, power to both my home and my place of business was shut off. I am a hairdresser, and I was fully booked for hair services during the week before Christmas. I was able to work 4 1/2 hours on that Wednesday, even without power. My salon is in the Dakota Ridge neighborhood, and we have a lot of natural light through two sides of the storefront windows. I brought in an oil lamp in anticipation of the shutdown. People didn’t seem to mind that their hair couldn’t be blown dry. They were just happy to get their hair cut and colored. About 2:30 that afternoon, we ran out of hot water, so I had to call it a day. We touched out the night in a cold, dark house. When I arose in the morning, I realized I would soon be out of cell phone battery charge and without Internet. I was not able to use my phone or email at all to get a hold of my clients to cancel them for the next few days. I packed a bag and drove straight to the Hampton Inn in Gunbarrel, and they took me right in. I was able to reschedule all the clients. Having previously been given an approximate time for power to be restored, I took the chance to reschedule people for Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, the week of Christmas.

It wasn’t the schedule I wanted to work that week, but I was just happy. I had the space to move people into. When I checked out Sunday morning, I drove straight to the salon and began working. We ended up losing all the food in our refrigerator and freezer. It didn’t occur to me to move the icemaker storage bin from the top of the freezer. So we had a flood in there as well. We had to spend a few hundred dollars at a hotel, but it all worked out. We understand the forced outage. We did see five or six utility poles cracked in half off of 63rd St. Neither my home neighborhood nor my work neighborhood has utility poles, but I understand we were likely on a grid with areas that did have them, so those grids had to be shut down. I just wanted to share my personal story.