I was at my mom's house when the computer blinked off. I checked to see who tripped over the power cord, then saw the lights were off all over the apartment, went outside and saw the whole block had lost power. Kept walking and someone told me the whole city had lost power. Headed back, someone was sitting in a parked car with the door open and the radio going with folks standing around listening. Radio said the whole northeast was blacked out. I mumbled to myself "whoever said on CPF last week that they wish they had more power failures should be careful what they ask for!!".
The lights I had with me included an Arc LS in my pocket and an Arc AAA and a UKE 2L in my belt pack. The belt pack was tucked away upstairs and so I set up the LS as an area light in the now-dark kitchen where my mom and a visitor had been sitting chatting. My mom also had her PT Blast. I just sat the LS on a shelf pointing at a wall, so the reflected light softly illuminated the room. After 10-15 minutes I went upstairs and got the AAA and 2L from the belt pack. Ow, ow! The LS was hot! But not hot enough to actually burn my hand, just uncomfortable to hold, I'm sure it was within its design limits. I replaced the LS on the shelf with the AAA which still provided plenty of light for sitting around and being able to see where your drink was and who you were talking to. That's a really useful level of light and it's very handy to have a long-running source.
My mom has a small radio/tape player that she keeps plugged into the wall. A few months earlier there had been another power failure there (just her building, and just for a few hours) but thinking of blackouts led me to go buy a pack of D cells to run the radio at that time just in case. Those came in very handy. I loaded them into the radio and we used that to keep up with news for the rest of the outage.
Several neighborhood stores stayed open (without power) and of course flashlights and batteries were all snapped up pretty fast. I didn't need more flashlights but decided a few spare batteries would be a good idea (I had a spare pair of Duracells but figured they might be needed in my mom's Blast). The store appeared out of alkaline batteries but it had some Chinese-made "Extra Heavy Duty" (i.e. zinc carbon) AAA's at 99 cents for a twelve pack. They looked cheap and awful but I figured they'd be better than nothing so I took a pack off the shelf. The guy in front of me in line asked the cashier for AA's and it turned out they had alkaline cells behind the counter, AA's and AAA's (but no D's) so I got a pair of alkaline AAA's, and decided to get the cheap cells anyway just to try them out. I figured if the Arc AAA could run 6 hours on an alkaline, it should run at least an hour or so on a Zn-C cell.
It turns out that the Zn-C cell ran the Arc for over 5 hours! I ran it continuously for 4 hours the first night just to see when it would crap out, and shut it off when I went to bed. Next day I ran it another hour or so. It had a steeper discharge curve than an alkaline would have had, i.e. through most of that run it was dimmer than an alkaline would have been (the Arc AAA is only semi-regulated). But it was still making more than enough light to walk around by the whole time. It never went into the completely unregulated mode that is only useful when you're very well dark adapted. I changed it out because of a bad problem (Peter take note!!): somehow the light wouldn't make reliable contact with the battery and just turn off entirely and refuse to turn back on without removing the battery, jiggling, tightening the head down extra hard, then unscrewing and tightening loosely, etc. I never quite got the hang of it. Same thing happened with a new one of the Zn-C cells (not as bad though). I don't know quite what was going on but I don't think that cell was really dead. Anyway I switched back to an alkaline which was still going strong.
The Arc AAA was definitely the champ of the outage for me. I ran it for 5+ hours (not all essential) as an area and general purpose light. When I needed to go somewhere leaving the AAA, I used the Arc LS. There were a few times when the LS's extra brightness was nice (e.g. when looking for something) but it was never essential. I played with the UKE 2L outside a little (it was amazingly good at lighting buildings across the street) but decided to use it sparingly so I could scavenge its two 123's for the Arc LS if needed (turned out to not be needed). My mom had a 4AA "closet light" but no batteries for it--I got some AA's at the same place as the AAA's and those worked fine so that light was handy. Finally, the food in the fridge started getting warm and Mom decided to cook it, which needed some direct light. So I held the Arc AAA over the stove for a while, then got an idea. I went to the local discount store which by then had long since run out of flashlights and batteries, but they had plenty of baseball caps so I bought her one, brought it home and clipped her PT Blast to it (the Blast has an integral pocket/hat clip). She loved it, said it made her feel like a coal miner. So that made a very handy headlamp.
Lessons learned from such a power failure:
Having bright lights isn't very important, especially long-running ones. Most times when you want a bright light, it's just for a few moments.
Having long-running lights is very useful, they just don't need to be all that bright. The Arc AAA was great. I may add a CMG Infinity to my travel kit.
The main use of a long-running light is as a stationary area light. A light that can stand on end is nice for that, but if you don't have one you can probably improvise something.
Having several lights is better than having one super-duper do-everything light.
The building stairwell had emergency lights which were quite powerful and useful during the first few hours, but then their batteries died and the stairwells were pitch dark. It would have helped a lot if they had a few LED's on top, that could have run for many days on the SLA packs inside.
I might have liked having a few chemical lightsticks around to stick in the stairwell. A flashlight left out there probably would have gotten stolen.
I would have felt better with spare D cells for the radio. Although the stores had some AA's on hand through the whole outage, all the D's got snapped up pretty fast. The D's in the radio did last long enough, as it turned out, and they weren't even alkaline. (We probably ran the radio about 12 hours because other people in the house kept wanting to listen).
Small, low-powered LED lights are great; other than that, I feel flashaholic lights (i.e. anything super-bright for its size, anything using Luxeons, etc.) aren't important. I'd much rather have two or three cheap plastic household 2AA or 2D lights than one Surefire L4 in this type of outage. Also, it's better to depend on common batteries than exotic ones. Although I did have spare 123's for the Arc LS, an AA-powered light would have been easier to keep fed.
I think it's worth having a few lights around that you can lend to strangers without worrying about getting them back. Hence, more cheap plastic lights.
I think I'm going to swap out my EDC Arc LS for a PT Blast. Also will get a few 99 cent household lights to keep in the fridge (maintains battery freshness).