Saturday morning I was in the middle of my workout and there was a big pop. The whole neighborhood's electricity went out.

I reported the outage, and then the utility came to my house. Apparently, we were the culprit. A squirrel. It lost its life, but it shut down the system.

I sent it to a buddy who's one of the leaders of a small local electric co-op. He said squirrels are the number one cause of outages. He's not exaggerating. The American Public Power Association, the trade group for community-owned power companies, tracks this. Across the whole country, squirrels come in third, behind trees and worn-out equipment. But in the Midwest, squirrels are number one, about 19% of the longer outages. And squirrel outages spike in the spring and the fall.

It's fall.

Most squirrel outages are small. A neighborhood, a bucket truck, a few hours. The big ones are different. In September 2008, the leftovers of Hurricane Ike blew through Louisville on a Sunday and over 300,000 LG&E customers lost power. That was about 75% of everybody they serve, and people were told it could take 10 to 14 days to get everyone back on.

One squirrel takes out a street. One windstorm takes out a city. If you own rentals, both of those are your problem too. Here's the house stuff most people never think about until the lights go out:

• Know where the main breaker and the water shutoff are, and show everybody in the house. For a rental, put both locations in the move-in packet so nobody's hunting for them with a phone flashlight.

• If the property has a sump pump in the basement (the pump that keeps groundwater from flooding it), a battery backup is one of the cheapest insurance policies there is. Storms knock the power out right when the sump needs to run.

• A full freezer stays cold about 48 hours with the door shut. Half full, about 24. The fridge, about 4. Keep the doors closed. Tell tenants that before the storm, not after.

• Never run a portable generator inside, in the garage, or near an open window. Carbon monoxide has no smell.

• Text your tenants the utility's outage number and outage map now, while the lights are on. It takes a minute and it makes you look like a pro. Here in Louisville, LG&E lets you text OUTAGE to 4LGEKU (454358), as long as your cell number is on the account. Tenants out in the counties on a co-op should save their co-op's outage number too.

• See a line down? Stay away from it and call 911. Treat every wire like it's live.

The household kit. Nothing crazy.

The official guidance from FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) at Ready.gov is at least three days of food and water for every person in the house. Honestly, I'd rather have a week. The UK just launched a campaign telling every household to keep three days of supplies on hand, and the Pentagon is working on getting every major military base able to run for 90 days on its own.

I'm not talking about a bunker. Buy a little in bulk, save some money, and find the room.

• Water. One gallon per person per day is the U.S. rule of thumb. A family of four for a week is 28 gallons. That's a few cases and a couple of the big jugs.

• Canned food you'd actually eat, and a manual can opener. Work it into your regular meals so nothing expires on the shelf.

• Batteries and a headlamp. A headlamp beats a flashlight because you get both hands back.

• A phone power bank, charged.

• Some cash in small bills, in case the card machines go down.

• A couple weeks of any prescriptions, and food for the pets.

If nothing ever happens, you have a full pantry and saved a few bucks. There's no losing side to it.

One more landlord thing. Most tenant emergencies are repeats. Write the answer to "the power's out, what do I do" once, and you're not typing it from scratch at 11 at night. Do the same for your ten most common fires.

Question for the landlords: what's in your storm or outage playbook? Do you put battery backups on the sump pumps in your rentals, and does your lease say anything about tenants running generators?