Wartime conditions. We are better positioned than most. Our preparations

20221104

We are ready for the worst in Kyiv. Not totally ready, just more ready than most in the city.

Most people live in apartments. Modern apartments are typically about 24 stories. Older ones run between eight and 15.

The elevators absolutely depend on electricity, and a large number of people are not in shape to manage the stairs. Hiking up and down 15 flights of stairs every day would be a tremendous hardship.

The water in the apartments depends on electricity. I don’t know exactly how it works, but I suspect that they have pumps to get the water where it needs to go. I hear that with no electricity most apartments are without water.

The alternative to running water is to carry it up the stairs. 15 flights? It would make an apartment rather uninhabitable if the electricity were totally out.

Where would the water come from? There are ponds throughout Kyiv, and two rivers run through the city. It would probably be possible for most people to get water.

Purifying the water is another question. Clorox tells you how.  Four drops of bleach per liter of water. First you have to let the water sit half an hour or so so all the sludge settles out of it, decant to another container, and then you have to let the bleach work for another half hour. We have two lakes across the street in two directions. We are going to have a couple of bottles of bleach around the house.

Toilets are another issue. If worse comes to worse we can treat our toilets as bedpans, collect our excretia and bury it in the back yard. Others are not so well positioned.

Older apartments have steam heat. This was a Soviet invention – pipe the hot water created as a byproduct of generating electricity to nearby apartments, so the heat is not wasted. Obviously it depends on generating electricity.

Newer apartments usually have heat pumps. Gas heat has not been popular because the gas comes from those undependable Russians. There are, however, gas mains and most of the major streets. I am sure that there are some percentage of dwellings with gas heat.

Our house is well insulated with SIP panel walls. Three or four hours of electricity a day should be adequate for the boiler to keep our house habitable. The deep backup is to use charcoal, as I saw it used in my former grandmother-in-law’s house in Nagoya. Older Japanese homes had a sunken hearth in the center of the main room called a irori. It was used both to cook and to keep the place warm. We can build the same thing by laying a layer of bricks on top of the linoleum atop our concrete floor. Use concrete block to build a little charcoal oven on the bricks, pull chairs and sofas into a circle to keep the heat inside, and snuggled together close to the fire.

Skeptics point out that there might be carbon monoxide from this. Yes, but not enough to worry about. That’s the reason you use charcoal instead of wood – it burns clean. The house is reasonably well ventilated. All of our ancestors used fire indoors and survived. I think we could make it work.

Our approach to cooking is superior to the Japanese irori.  Instead of hanging a pot over the charcoal, we will use butane. Butane is heavy! Yesterday I strapped the 10 kg (22 pound) empty butane bottle on the back of my bicycle, pedaled the mile and a half to the appropriate gas station and filled it with 15 kg (25 L, 33lb) of butane. I got lucky as I returned. I was at the foot of the stairs leading up the steep embankment to go over the railroad tracks contemplating how I was going to manage it when a helpful young Ukrainian guy came by. The two of us managed to wrestle the bicycle, tank and all, up and back down.

The electric schedule is five hours on, four hours off. I am getting pretty adept at changing clothes, brushing my teeth, and even cooking in the dark. I’m becoming a good judge of the gradients of darkness. When there is no moon you can’t see anything at all. At the moment we have a waxing gibbous moon which gives enough light to get Marianna and me ready for bed without a flashlight.

I got lucky with the flashlight. A couple of months ago I bought a rechargeable light for my bicycle. It plugs into a USB connection. Last night we used it for four hours and it didn’t go dim. I wrapped it around the cord of our hanging ceiling lamp in the kitchen and it provided enough light for a pleasant family evening. The five of us gathered on two facing sofas. The kids love crawling all over mommy and daddy.  Next time I’m at that market I’m going to buy another such flashlight.

Oksana keeps asking nervous questions and, while less than 100% satisfied with the answers, is at least happy I’ve been thinking about it. The children are leading more or less normal lives. Eddie has enough light to read his school textbooks and do his homework. I am confident that just about every other child in the country is facing more significant disruptions to their learning. Zoriana’s kindergarten just soldiers on, light or no light. 

That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man is coping, the good-looking woman praying, and the kids feel safe and secure, though Eddie glues himself to the war news every morning.

Graham