We had a situation here at home that was kind of weird. We were watching television when the power went out in the living room. I could see that the lights were still on in the kitchen, so I thought, "Oh this isn't a big deal. We must have tripped a circuit breaker. I'll just go switch it back on." I went out to the garage and looked at the circuit breaker panel and everything looked fine.

When I came back into the house I noticed that some of the other lights in the house weren't working either. The kitchen lights were working and one of the bedrooms was working, but the other two bedrooms were not. The lights were off in both bathrooms and also in the laundry room.

We were having trouble with the power, but it wasn't a complete power failure because only part of the house was affected. At this point I realized that this was not a simple problem. I was going to have to call an electrician to come in and figure out what was going on.

The next morning the electrician came. He checked out the wiring and traced everything back to the circuit breaker panel. That was OK so next he traced everything back to the electric meter on the outside of the house and discovered the problem was actually at the meter. He told me, "Well, this is nothing that I can fix. You're going to have to call the power company and have them come out and look at it."

That was my next step. I called the power company and they sent someone out to check on the situation. They discovered a break in one of the main power lines coming to the meter. In our neighborhood all of the lines are buried underground so this wasn't an obvious problem they could find just by looking. They actually had to use some special equipment to figure out what was going on. Once they found the problem they ran a temporary line over the fence, through the backyard, over another fence and out to the meter. At that point we had full power restored to the house once again.

All in all we were pretty lucky. We had to take a flashlight into the bathroom, but that was just an inconvenience. The most important thing was that we never lost power to the kitchen. Our refrigerator kept running, and that was really important because we didn't lose any food.

But this got me thinking. What if it wasn't just our house that was affected? What if the power company couldn't respond quickly? My hope is that you can use the information in this course to come up with a plan for yourself and your family if something like this ever happens to you.