I'm 60 And I've Survived Three Blackouts — Here's What I Keep By My Door

December twenty third, 1989. Two days before Christmas, the power went out at nine at night, and it went to one below in Dallas that week — still the record. I was twenty three. I had a flashlight and I knew exactly which drawer it was in. I went to that drawer in the dark, got it in my hand, pushed the switch, and nothing happened at all. The batteries had let go years before and dried into a hard white crust that ate the contacts. The flashlight was not flat. It was destroyed, and it had been destroyed for a long time, sitting in the drawer where it was supposed to be. That is the whole reason I keep eleven things on one shelf by the back door now, at sixty years old — and the first thing on that shelf is not a flashlight, and it is not food, and it is not water. It is a carbon monoxide alarm that runs on batteries, and here is the part almost nobody has been told: that alarm has an expiry date. Not the battery — the alarm. The sensor inside is a chemical thing and it wears out whether you use it or not, usually somewhere between five and seven years from the date it was made, which is stamped on the back. And when it is finished it does not go dark or fall off the wall. It powers up, the little light comes on, you press the test button and it shrieks at you exactly like it always did — because the test button checks the battery and the horn, and it has never once checked the sensor. So the alarm passes its test, sitting on the ceiling, dead. That is my 1989 flashlight all over again, and there is a good chance one is doing it in your house tonight. There are no candles on my shelf either, and that is deliberate: of the candle fires in this country that kill somebody, twenty six per cent were candles being used for light because the power was out. The rest of it is wool instead of fleece, batteries out of the torch and still in the packet, a shut-off key wired to the valve, and the one that nearly did for me in 2008 — a generator running in the garage with the door up, which felt perfectly reasonable at the time. It is not. Your house sits at slightly different pressure to the outside and pulls air in through every gap it has, so an open garage door does not save you; a garage is still a room attached to your house. Down in the comments, tell me — have you been through a real one? Not an hour. A proper one, days. And what was the thing you did not have? Not the dramatic thing, the stupid small thing you have thought about ever since. I read every one of those. The one that comes up most is the one I go deep on next. --- ⚠️ This video was made with AI. The presenter, the voice and the footage are generated; the dates, the death tolls and the safety figures are checked before it goes out. Nothing here is professional safety advice, and the generator part is the part to take seriously. Never run a generator inside a house, a garage, a basement, a shed or a crawl space — not even with the door open. Keep it at least twenty feet from the building with the exhaust pointed away from every door, window and vent, fit battery-operated carbon monoxide alarms where people sleep, and if one sounds, get everybody outside first and call for help from there. Do not walk around the house trying to work out whether it is real. #prepping #poweroutage #blackout #preparedness #emergencypreparedness #survival #carbonmonoxide #shtf