The Night the Power Went Out and a Little Red Radio Kept Us Informed

The freezing rain started late on a Tuesday afternoon. By six o'clock a limb had come down across the line at the bottom of the road and the house went dark and quiet at the same time. Hollis went for the flashlight in the kitchen drawer. I went for the Midland radio sitting on the kitchen table.

It had been sitting there since November, and I will admit that for most of that time it was furniture. I bought the Midland ER310 in September of last year after a night in August of last year when a thunderstorm took the power out for about nine hours, my phone sat at eleven percent, and I had no way of knowing what the weather was still doing. I wanted a way to hear a forecast that did not run on the same battery I had been using all day. That was the whole reason, and it is still the whole reason.

The first thing I did that Tuesday night was crank it. That is the way I have done it from the start. There is a handle on the side, you turn it, and the weather band is right there. I found a station and sat at the table in the dark listening to a voice tell me the freezing rain would keep on until morning and the roads were already bad. The Midland weighs about a pound, so it is not a thing that takes up your table.

Three days without power is not something you can hear in a forecast. Nobody told me it would be three days. What I knew that night was that the lights were out, the rain was still coming down, and I had a person in the room telling me what was happening. That is not a small thing when the house is dark.

My phone still gives me alerts when it has a signal. I am not going to pretend otherwise, and I am not one of those people who thinks a telephone is a bad idea. But a phone is a thing you have to keep fed, and in weather it is the first one to go hungry. I have driven enough miles through enough storms to know that the thing you can turn by hand is the thing still working after everything else has quit.

Wednesday morning the cell signal went weak and then quit for most of the day. The radio ran on the six AA batteries that came in the box, from Wednesday until Friday, and never ran down once.

Wednesday morning the signal got weak and then it was gone, and it stayed gone for most of the day. I switched the Midland over to the six AA batteries that came in the box with it. Those same batteries ran it from Wednesday until Friday and never ran down. I have not changed them and I do not keep a spare set, which is a piece of advice I will get to. The crank is there for when they finally do quit.

Around noon that day it carried a boil water notice for our district. That was the whole of it for us. We were lucky and I know it.

Then in March there was a night with a tornado warning on it. Before bed I carried the radio to the nightstand, which is the only night it has left the kitchen table in the months it lives there. Around two in the morning I took it down the hall with us and we sat in the hall, the one inside space in this house with no windows. The storm passed north of us. We had no damage and the power never even blinked.

I want to be straight about what this Midland is, because I have read descriptions of it that made me wonder whether we owned the same object. The solar panel is real, and I tried it once on a windowsill on a gray day and it did very little, so I have never leaned on it. It is not water resistant, so mine lives indoors and I would not leave it on a porch. There is a flashlight built into it. The USB connection will give a phone a small top up, and I have done that once or twice, but it is not a phone charger and the crank will not charge a phone. That job belongs to something else in my closet and I will not blur the two.

Friday around noon the power came back and the radio went back to being furniture on the kitchen table. I did not put it away, because it was January and the table is where it lives from November through May. I am not going to tell you a radio will save your life. I do not know that, and I would not trust a person who promised it. What I know is that for three days the one thing in this house that never needed anything from anybody was that Midland, sitting right there on the table.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you are going to buy one thing before the next storm, buy the plain thing and learn it while the sun is out. Find the weather band on a bright afternoon and see where your nearest station sits, because you do not want to be hunting for it in the dark with wet hands. Crank it a few times so your hands know the motion. Keep a spare set of AA batteries in the drawer. I have not gotten around to it, and you should not copy me on that. Do not count on the solar panel in January. Do not leave it outdoors, because it is not built for rain. And when your county tells you to go, go. A radio is for information, not for bravery. Mine is a Midland and it is the one item I would buy again first, before anything else in that closet.