With the power restored and phones and Internet services working again, people probably feel as though they’ve reentered the world of the 21st century, after a brief stint in the early 19th. We’re left to wonder just how those early Americans did it—lived without electricity and all the conveniences that come with it: heat, TV, computers, telephones, and flush toilets, to name a few. What did they do for amusement in the winter when the sun set at 4:30 p.m.?

Our extended power outage this month gave us a taste of what it must have been like to live in a time when most of people’s efforts were focused on the necessities of daily living, and life moved at a slower pace because there was no instant communication to speed it along. The power outage also gave us a wake-up call: were we prepared for such an emergency?

State and local governments have emergency plans in some form or other, but do we? If we knew such a power outage was going to happen next month, how would we prepare? What would we do differently? What would our own emergency readiness plan look like?

State and local governments can take care of only so much in an emergency. We owe it to ourselves and our families to make sure we are ready the next time disaster comes calling.