Hurricane Lala left parts of Hawaii without power for weeks, and historic floods knocked out tens of thousands of Indiana homes for days. Here is how to prepare for a long power outage: sizing and choosing backup power to ride out a multi-day grid-down before the next storm.
When Hurricane Lala brushed the Hawaiian Islands in mid-August, it briefly reached Category 1 before weakening — but it still cut power to more than 197,000 homes and businesses at its peak. Days later, over 117,000 customers were still in the dark. High winds took down a major transmission line and half a dozen sub-transmission lines, and utilities warned that some outages in the hardest-hit rural areas of Hawaii Island could last weeks, even months.
That timeline is the part most households underestimate. A backup plan built for a 24- to 48-hour outage is a very different thing from one that has to carry you through two or three weeks. Refrigerated food, medications that need cooling, well pumps, medical devices, phones, and the ability to get information all depend on power you no longer have — and gas stations, ATMs, and stores inside the outage zone are usually down too.
If you live anywhere a hurricane, ice storm, or wildfire can reach, plan for the long tail, not the average. Know which of your needs are truly power-critical, top off every device before a storm arrives, and have a way to generate or store electricity that does not depend on the grid coming back on schedule.
MyPlann's Grid Down plan sizes your water, food, power, and communications for an extended outage — so you know how many days you can actually last before the lights come back.
In central Indiana, it was not wind — it was water. More than 11 inches of rain fell in about 32 hours (a 1-in-1,000-year rate near New Castle), pushing the White River past records that had stood since 1913: 24.9 feet at Anderson and 24.6 at Noblesville. At the peak roughly 300,000 customers lost power, and more than a week later tens of thousands were still without it, with one utility reporting 75,000 homes still down. Seven people died in the storms.
Flooding creates a slower, uglier kind of outage than a passing storm. Submerged substations and washed-out roads mean crews cannot even reach the damage, so restoration drags for days. Meanwhile floodwater contaminates the tap supply, basements fill, and sump pumps — the one thing that could help — are useless without electricity.
The lesson is redundancy: a way to keep a few essential circuits running — sump pump, refrigerator, phone, a light or two — when both the grid and the roads are out. And because flooding and power loss travel together, water storage and treatment belong in the same plan as your backup power.
A Grid Down plan in MyPlann pairs backup power with stored, treatable water — the two things a multi-day flood outage takes out at the same time.
The two go-to options in an extended outage are a fuel generator (gas, propane, or dual-fuel) and a solar generator — really a large battery 'power station' that recharges from solar panels. A fuel generator makes a lot of power cheaply and runs as long as you have fuel — but fuel is exactly what runs out in a multi-day event, it cannot run indoors or in rain, and it is loud and a carbon-monoxide risk. In both the Hawaii and Indiana outages, the households that struggled most were often the ones who had a generator but could not get gas.
A solar generator is quiet, safe to run indoors, and refuels from the sun — no fuel runs, no fumes. The trade-off is capacity and cost: a battery holds only so many kilowatt-hours, and the cloudy days that come with exactly the storms causing your outage slow the recharge. For most households the strongest answer is not either/or — it is a battery power station for the quiet, indoor-safe essentials (phones, medical devices, a refrigerator in short cycles, lights), panels to stretch it, and optionally a fuel generator for heavy loads when fuel is available.
Whatever you choose, buy it and test it before the storm, not during. Know its real runtime under your actual loads, keep it charged, and have the cables and adapters you will need already on hand.
Start with what you must keep running, not with the size of the unit. Add up the watts of your true essentials: a full-size refrigerator averages around 100-200 watts (but over 1,000 at start-up), a CPAP 30-60 watts, phone and laptop charging a few dozen watts, LED lights a handful each, a sump pump roughly 800-1,050 running watts plus a big start-up surge. A realistic 'ride out the essentials' load lands somewhere around 300-800 running watts.
Then decide how long. Battery power stations are rated in watt-hours: a 2,000 Wh unit running a 150-watt load lasts roughly 13 hours before it needs a recharge, so panels (or a generator) are what turn 'overnight' into 'all week.' Size the surge, too — motors like refrigerators and pumps spike well above their running watts at start-up, and your unit's surge rating has to clear that or it will trip.
Write it down before you shop: essential watts, required surge, and how many hours you need between recharges. That one page turns a confusing spec sheet into a clear buy — and it is the same math a Grid Down plan walks you through.
You do not need to buy everything at once — you need the right order. First, the non-negotiables: water (one gallon per person per day, two weeks' worth if you can store it), a way to keep phones and a weather radio powered, flashlights and headlamps with spare batteries, and a manual backup for anything medical. Next, food you can eat without cooking and a way to cook without the stove.
Then power: a battery power station sized to your essentials, panels to recharge it, and — if you go that route — a fuel generator with safely stored fuel and a carbon-monoxide alarm. Finally, the small things that decide comfort: a cooler and ice plan for the refrigerator's first day, cash for when card readers are down, and a full tank of gas in the car before the storm.
Run it once while the grid is up. A two-hour 'blackout drill' — breakers off, living only on your backup — surfaces every gap while it is still cheap to fix.
MyPlann's Grid Down scenario turns this into a personalized checklist — it counts your household, your stored supplies, and your power on hand, then tells you where the gaps are.
MyPlann maps your real preparedness level against every scenario in this brief — and shows you exactly what to address first. Free during early access.
Free during early access. No spam, ever.