MIDLAND, Texas — No power and nowhere to go. When it was clear there wouldn't be any power any time soon, Keith Guinn took action. He powered up his generator to start running essential appliances.
"Of course we can charge phones and all that, but the main thing is the big two items. I was thinking just the heat of course and then a refrigerator try to keep stuff cold," Guinn said.
Rolling outages were the expectation, not long outages. The first time the power went out during the rolling outage, Guinn started to get things ready.
"So I went ahead and was getting the generator ready. When the power came back on I didn’t worry about it, but the power went right back off so at about 3:40 this morning we’ve been on generator from then on," Guinn said.
However, running a generator is not as simple as turning it on and plugging everything in.
"Your generators will have the specifications on what you can do and you just gotta pay attention on that. Then you know you’ve got to run it outside. So I’ve actually got it in the garage, but I’ve got the garage with a bucket holding the garage door open and shooting the exhaust straight out from there," Guinn said.
Keith is thankful to have resources handy. It enabled him to help heat his home and help his other family members get through an unprecedented storm.
"It was great because I think their gas didn’t work. They're in a newer edition in Midland and apparently their gas log thing wouldn’t even work and the pilot went out on it. So we’re really fortunate they can come over here. We got the home heated at least," Guinn said.