How to prepare for a power outage in Washington County

Most outage advice is written for places where the danger is cold. Down here it is the opposite, and that changes what actually matters.

After Thursday’s county-wide outage, this is worth having somewhere you can find it. Nothing below is my invention — it comes from Ready.gov, the USDA and the City of St. George. What I have done is put it in the order that makes sense for a desert county in August.

First: heat is the real risk

In a Washington County summer, the thing that can genuinely hurt someone in an outage is not darkness. It is losing air conditioning.

Know where you would go. During Thursday’s outage, Ivins opened City Hall as a cooling center. Cities here do this. Find out now what your city does, rather than looking it up on a dead phone.

Keep the house closed. Doors and windows shut, and cover the windows. A closed, shaded house holds cool air far longer than most people expect. Opening up to “get some air” in an August afternoon does the opposite of what it feels like it should.

Plan for the vulnerable first. Older neighbors, anyone with a medical condition affected by heat, infants, pets. If you have someone on your street who fits that description, an outage is the moment to knock on the door.

Never use a gas stove or oven to heat or cool a space. It does not work, and it produces carbon monoxide.

Second: food

This is where most of the actual money gets lost, and where the rules are simple.

Keep the doors shut. A refrigerator holds food safely for roughly four hours unopened. A full freezer holds for about 48 hours. Every time you open it, you spend some of that.

The 40-degree rule. Discard perishable food — meat, poultry, fish, eggs, leftovers — if it has been at 40°F or above for two hours or more. A cheap appliance thermometer in the fridge takes the guesswork out of this entirely, and is worth the few dollars.

When in doubt, throw it out. Not a saying, a rule. You cannot tell by smell whether something has spent the evening in the danger zone.

For a long outage, dry ice works. Roughly 50 pounds keeps an 18-cubic-foot freezer cold for about two days.

Refrigerated medication. Discard it unless the label says otherwise, and talk to your pharmacist before you replace anything.

Third: the road

This is the one that caused real harm on Thursday.

St. George Police reported ten accidents by 8:29 p.m. — against a normal two or three for a Thursday evening. That is what dark traffic signals do.

A signal with no power is a four-way stop. Every direction stops. Every time. Not “whoever gets there first,” not “the bigger road goes.” If everyone treated dark lights this way, that accident number would look very different.

If you do not need to drive during an outage, the genuinely correct move is to stay home.

Generators, if you have one

Outdoors only. Never in a garage, never in a basement, never near a window or vent, even with the door open. Carbon monoxide from a generator kills people every year, and it does it quickly and without warning.

Beyond that: let it cool before refueling, plug appliances directly into it rather than backfeeding your house wiring, and do not exceed its rating.

The small things worth doing before there is an outage

• Flashlights somewhere you can find in the dark. Not candles — flashlights.
• Phones and battery packs charged, especially heading into a hot evening.
• A cooler and a couple of frozen jugs of water in the freezer. They keep the freezer colder and become drinking water later.
• Your utility’s alert system set up. Dixie Power and Rocky Mountain Power both push updates by text, email and social media, and during Thursday’s event that was the fastest source of real information.
• If you are on a well, know that no power means no pump. Keep drinking water on hand.

Call 911 only for emergencies

During a county-wide event, dispatch gets flooded. A call about when the power is coming back takes a line away from someone who needs it. Utilities publish restoration information; 911 does not have it anyway.

The honest perspective

Washington County restored a county-wide transmission failure in roughly a night, in high heat. That is a good outcome, and it is worth holding onto the next time the lights flicker.

Preparation here is not about bunkers. It is a thermometer in the fridge, a working flashlight, knowing your city’s cooling center, and stopping at dark intersections.

If this event has you thinking harder about what living down here actually asks of you, that is a reasonable place to be — I have written honestly about it, and about whether the outage should change your thinking on moving here.

Sources: Ready.gov, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the City of St. George, as compiled by St. George News; accident figures from St. George Police via FOX 13 News.

What makes an outage different in this climate

The reason preparation matters more here than in a milder place is cooling rather than heating.

In a hot month, losing power means losing air conditioning, and a house heats up faster than people expect once the system stops. That is the genuine risk for anyone vulnerable to heat, and it is the thing to plan around rather than the inconvenience of the lights.

Practical consequences: know where you would go if the house became too warm, keep the house closed and shaded rather than opening it up, and have a plan for anyone in the household who is heat-sensitive. What the summer actually does to a day here is the broader context, and it explains why the cooling system matters more than any other appliance.

The house-buying version of this question

If you are moving here, a few things make a property more resilient, and they are worth noticing while you are still choosing.

The cooling system’s age and specification, because an efficient system in a well-insulated house holds its temperature far longer once the power stops.

Shade and orientation. A house with afternoon shade behaves completely differently in a hot-weather outage from one without. Shade is the highest-value improvement in a desert yard and this is one of the reasons.

Whether the property is on a well. If it is, no power means no pump and therefore no water. That is a materially different situation from being on a municipal supply, and it belongs in your planning. What to verify on a well property covers the rest of that homework.

Whether there is solar, and what kind. Panels alone do not generally keep a house running in an outage; that depends on the system and whether there is storage. Ask specifically rather than assuming.

Keeping it proportionate

Outages here are not a frequent feature of life, and this is not a reason to hesitate about moving.

Whether a single event should change your thinking about relocating is the honest answer, and the short version is that every place has something. Preparation is cheap, it is mostly things you would sensibly own anyway, and once it is done you stop thinking about it.

I am Kelsey Earl, a Realtor with Keller Williams South Valley, and the households who handled the last one best were not the most prepared. They were the ones who had already thought about where they would go if the house got too warm.

If you are weighing a move here and want a straight read on the county rather than a list of worries, get in touch.