Huge tree fell across our one lane road in the mountains when I was growing up. We had a big snow storm and we got something like 6 feet of snow in two days.

Thankfully everyone out there had wood stoves for heat. Plenty of fresh snow to melt for water. After the snowing stopped everyone trapped behind the fallen tree worked together to cut the trees and get it off the road. It was a pretty big pine tree so it took like 15 people with several chainsaws all day to get it cut apart and off the road.

Still took like a week for a plow to come out and make the road clear enough for the power and telephone people to come out and fix it up for us.

I’ll never forget how unbelievably dead silent it was when I was laying there in 5+ feet of fresh powder. Because the power lines were down there wasn’t even that faint buzz/hum of electricity that you don’t usually notice but it’s always there. Absolute pure silence. You could hear your own heart beating and every little sound your clothing made when you did so much as even breath.

Truthfully I loved that week. The whole family slept in the living room by the fireplace. We had candles around at night since we didn’t have a ton of flashlights and batteries. My mom would send me brother out to get snow with the biggest pot she had. We would like it as high as we could while still being able to carry it. It would melt down to like half the pot haha. We cooked on the wood stove which took some adjustments. I think my mom treind to make spaghetti squash by wrapping a whole squash in foil and tossing inside the fire place on the red hot coals. Ended up burning it pretty badly but we had fun anyway. Played lots of board games and just kinda hung out as a family. Went on some hikes to see what our usual paths looked like with so much snow on them.

10/10 would get snowed in again.

Two weeks after a hurricane. Couldn’t get out of the driveway for a few days either. Fortunately we were renovating a bathroom and had an empty bathtub in the yard that filled with rain and were able to use a gas stove to boil water.

Week long camping trips mostly.

Otherwise, I was alive during the coal miners’ strikes in the 1970s in the UK which lead to widespread powercuts on a regular basis but I don’t remember them myself. Though I do remember that my parents always kept some candles and a couple of oil lanterns around the house.

In a home, 10 days because ComEd is bad at what they do.

Personally, a 30 day hiking trip. Those are very different circumstances though.

one day.

1.5 days

2 years. Lived in a village of about 400 people in West Africa.

Man, all of these responses are crazy to me. They sound like living in some corporate cyberpunk dystopia instead of a developed economy. Been living in Sydney for 35 years. Grew up on the outskirts that were minutes from bush and farmland. I have essentially never experienced power loss for more than a day. I don’t think the powers been out for more than 6 hours in the last 2 decades. I don’t even think the power’s cut out once in the last 2-3 years. There may have been 1 or 2 occasions that took longer than a day, after severe storms, when I was a child, but the memories are so vague I’m not sure they even happened, and definitely not more than 48 hours.

I grew up with computers and cable, so I would remember if I were forced to raw dog existence for fucking days. It would of been trauma.

as a working class person, my entire life

When I was eleven (1988) we moved to a rural property with no power. I left when I was eighteen… So… Seven years.

Honestly, probably not longer than a weekend. And even that was due to being at a festival, not because of any outage. I can’t remember an outage longer than an hour tbh

Ice storm of 2004, we didn’t have power for 13 days, 10 of those days the road conditions were so bad that we couldn’t get off the farm.
We had switched over to gas heat about 5 years before and didn’t have a wood burner anymore so we had to resort to boiling pots of snow on the gas stove to keep the house above freezing.
The whole family slept in the downstairs living room adjacent to the kitchen with the gas stove in our sleeping bags and camping gear to stay warm.
On day 10 when the roads were accessible again we went to town but most places were still closed in the ones that weren’t were picked pretty clean.
We we’re able to find kerosene for the kerosene heaters and kept the house a little warmer for the next three days until the power came back on.

After hurricane Helene we didn’t have electricity for 6 days. But I’ve been completely powerless for 34 years.

After the power company (PG&E) got blamed and sued for some big fires that destroyed entire neighborhoods in 2017, they got salty and decided to cut power whenever there were high winds predicted during red flag (high fire risk) days. The worst one was 15 days. I’m on a well with an electric pump, so there was no water for those days either.

Also, I lived off grid for about four years with only enough solar to either charge a phone (no service though) or run a light bulb in the evening. I did go to town to check my email and read the news every week or so.

Can’t tell if it’s a joke question, a questions about having agency over your life/others’, or if it’s specifically about having access to electricity. And at this point I’m too afraid to ask. Based on the responses, they don’t clear it up at all.