May 27, 2026·GridPrepped Team
An Outage Plan You Actually Maintain Beats Any Amount of Gear
A Canadian astronaut's rule for fear applies directly to power outages: preparation removes it. Build a plan, keep it current — here's how, free on GridPrepped.
Chris Hadfield is a Canadian astronaut who is afraid of heights. He flew to space three times anyway. His explanation for how he did it is worth stealing: fear, he wrote, comes from not knowing what to expect and not feeling you have any control over what's about to happen. When you feel helpless, you're more afraid than the facts justify. The fix isn't bravery. It's preparation.
That's not a space problem. It's the exact reason a power outage feels completely different depending on whether you've thought it through in advance. The lights going off is the same event either way. Whether it's a scary night or a managed inconvenience is decided weeks earlier — by whether you have a plan, and whether that plan is still true.
The average outage is boring. The bad one isn't.
Here's the number most people anchor to and shouldn't. The EIA's Electric Power Annual 2024 found U.S. customers averaged about 11 hours of power interruptions last year — roughly twice the annual average of the previous decade. But strip out major storms and the typical year is around two hours. Annoying, not dangerous.
The reason 2024 doubled is that 80% of those hours came from three hurricanes — Beryl, Helene, and Milton. That's the part worth planning for. The average is a flicker you barely notice. The tail is the multi-day stretch after a storm — customers in South Carolina averaged nearly 53 hours without power in 2024.
A plan isn't for the two-hour blip. It's for the bad night that follows the bad weather. And national averages tell you nothing about your odds — that's why GridPrepped's county-level outage history shows what your specific area has actually lived through. You plan against your own record, not a headline.
Owning gear isn't the same as having a plan.
Good news first: people are buying in. FEMA's 2024 National Household Survey found 83% of adults had taken at least three preparedness actions — a big jump from 57% the year before. The catch is in the same data. Only about a third felt confident those actions would actually make a difference.
That gap — lots of gear, little confidence — is Hadfield's helplessness in household form. A drawer full of batteries doesn't tell you who picks up the kids if the school loses power and your phone's at 4%. It doesn't tell you where everyone meets, who the out-of-area contact is, or how your neighbor on oxygen gets through a 12-hour cut. Supplies are the easy half. The plan is the half that removes the fear, because it answers the questions before the dark does.
GridPrepped's plan builder walks you through the decisions, not just the shopping list — communication, water, medical needs, who does what — and turns them into something you can actually hand to everyone in the house.
A plan you don't maintain is already wrong.
Hadfield's crews don't write a procedure once and file it. They re-run it until it's reflex. The household version is lower stakes and far less effort, but the principle is identical: a plan decays quietly.
Phone numbers change. Kids age out of one arrangement and into another. You move. Prescriptions change. The batteries you bought in 2023 are flat. The plan that was exactly right last spring slowly stops being right — and you don't find out until the lights go off and you're reading from a list that names a babysitter who moved away.
The fix is a standing review, not a once-a-year scramble. Fifteen minutes a quarter to check the parts that rot:
- Contacts and the out-of-area person everyone checks in with
- Medication and any medical-device backup power
- Water and food rotation
- Batteries, chargers, and your honest phone-as-flashlight reality
- Anything that changed — a new baby, a new pet, a new address
A free GridPrepped account saves your plan, lets you download it as a PDF, and keeps it current as your risk profile and checklists update. There's no paywall, no premium tier, no "unlock the real checklist for $9.99." The entire point is that the plan stays usable — a plan locked behind a subscription is one you won't open when it counts.
Hard next step
Open the plan builder and finish a first draft today — not the perfect version, the done one. Then put one recurring event on your calendar: "Review outage plan," every three months. That single repeating reminder is the difference between a plan and a pile of good intentions.
Hadfield never stopped being afraid of heights. He just made sure the fear never got to make the decisions. A current plan does the same thing for the next outage.
Sources
- U.S. Energy Information Administration, "Hurricanes in 2024 led to the most hours without power in the United States in 10 years" (Electric Power Annual 2024): https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=66744
- Utility Dive, "Americans lost more power last year than any year in previous decade: EIA": https://www.utilitydive.com/news/hurricane-power-outage-electricity-climate-change-helene-milton/806771/
- FEMA 2024 National Household Survey on Disaster Preparedness (summary coverage): https://buckhorncliffs.com/femas-2024-national-household-survey/
- Chris Hadfield, "An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth" (quotations): https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1136925.Chris_Hadfield
That's not a space problem. It's the exact reason a power outage feels completely different depending on whether you've thought it through in advance. The lights going off is the same event either way. Whether it's a scary night or a managed inconvenience is decided weeks earlier — by whether you have a plan, and whether that plan is still true.
The average outage is boring. The bad one isn't.
Here's the number most people anchor to and shouldn't. The EIA's Electric Power Annual 2024 found U.S. customers averaged about 11 hours of power interruptions last year — roughly twice the annual average of the previous decade. But strip out major storms and the typical year is around two hours. Annoying, not dangerous.
The reason 2024 doubled is that 80% of those hours came from three hurricanes — Beryl, Helene, and Milton. That's the part worth planning for. The average is a flicker you barely notice. The tail is the multi-day stretch after a storm — customers in South Carolina averaged nearly 53 hours without power in 2024.
A plan isn't for the two-hour blip. It's for the bad night that follows the bad weather. And national averages tell you nothing about your odds — that's why GridPrepped's county-level outage history shows what your specific area has actually lived through. You plan against your own record, not a headline.
Owning gear isn't the same as having a plan.
Good news first: people are buying in. FEMA's 2024 National Household Survey found 83% of adults had taken at least three preparedness actions — a big jump from 57% the year before. The catch is in the same data. Only about a third felt confident those actions would actually make a difference.
That gap — lots of gear, little confidence — is Hadfield's helplessness in household form. A drawer full of batteries doesn't tell you who picks up the kids if the school loses power and your phone's at 4%. It doesn't tell you where everyone meets, who the out-of-area contact is, or how your neighbor on oxygen gets through a 12-hour cut. Supplies are the easy half. The plan is the half that removes the fear, because it answers the questions before the dark does.
GridPrepped's plan builder walks you through the decisions, not just the shopping list — communication, water, medical needs, who does what — and turns them into something you can actually hand to everyone in the house.
A plan you don't maintain is already wrong.
Hadfield's crews don't write a procedure once and file it. They re-run it until it's reflex. The household version is lower stakes and far less effort, but the principle is identical: a plan decays quietly.
Phone numbers change. Kids age out of one arrangement and into another. You move. Prescriptions change. The batteries you bought in 2023 are flat. The plan that was exactly right last spring slowly stops being right — and you don't find out until the lights go off and you're reading from a list that names a babysitter who moved away.
The fix is a standing review, not a once-a-year scramble. Fifteen minutes a quarter to check the parts that rot:
- Contacts and the out-of-area person everyone checks in with
- Medication and any medical-device backup power
- Water and food rotation
- Batteries, chargers, and your honest phone-as-flashlight reality
- Anything that changed — a new baby, a new pet, a new address
A free GridPrepped account saves your plan, lets you download it as a PDF, and keeps it current as your risk profile and checklists update. There's no paywall, no premium tier, no "unlock the real checklist for $9.99." The entire point is that the plan stays usable — a plan locked behind a subscription is one you won't open when it counts.
Hard next step
Open the plan builder and finish a first draft today — not the perfect version, the done one. Then put one recurring event on your calendar: "Review outage plan," every three months. That single repeating reminder is the difference between a plan and a pile of good intentions.
Hadfield never stopped being afraid of heights. He just made sure the fear never got to make the decisions. A current plan does the same thing for the next outage.
Sources
- U.S. Energy Information Administration, "Hurricanes in 2024 led to the most hours without power in the United States in 10 years" (Electric Power Annual 2024): https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=66744
- Utility Dive, "Americans lost more power last year than any year in previous decade: EIA": https://www.utilitydive.com/news/hurricane-power-outage-electricity-climate-change-helene-milton/806771/
- FEMA 2024 National Household Survey on Disaster Preparedness (summary coverage): https://buckhorncliffs.com/femas-2024-national-household-survey/
- Chris Hadfield, "An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth" (quotations): https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1136925.Chris_Hadfield