Some say food will last a good number of hours if the doors are not opened. I don't know what the cutoff time is. Obviously it depends on the insulation quality of the fridge and the room temperature.
My neighborhood power relability is not so good. One local restaurant got a generator and the police have a generator for the traffic light. If storms are predicted, these generators are pulled out to be ready.
The local convenience store has to dump all its perishables which is a lot of food (frozen and deli items of which it sells a lot). Seems to me they should get a generator for their frig/freezers to save their stock. Even if the store has to close due to no lights at least they can reopen immediately when the lights come on. However, the generator needed for powering commercial grade and size freezers and refrigerators may be very large and too big to be practical.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Now that the weekend is over and things are back to at least a semblence of normalacy, we here (the Townson household) have found have found that much of what we considered to be 'ruined' in fact unthawed a little but is mostly okay. I kept the refrigerator/freezer doors closed entirely the entire night except once for a jug of icewater and cola to drink. An informal audit taken of some of the restaurant business places around town (such as Dairy Queen where we ate Saturday night) said Friday night was a real bummer, having to clean up/close up in the dark Friday night, but they managed to get by. Microtel and Super Eight (two motels along that West Main Street strip as well as Walmart are still trying to get things back to normal as of today, Monday afternoon. All the businesses along there now have generators, compliments of Westar Energy. They even gave a couple generators to the handful of residences still affected out there, and told them all to _carefully_ ration the power among themslves.Walmart -- not to be outwitted -- has a couple of large, noisy generators sitting in their parking lot, which is otherwise taken over by Westar/KGE trucks and equipment. The main road into Walmart has police cars with officers waving everyone away, so Walmart fixed things up so if you wish to get into their store, there is a little tiny road several yards west which terminates in their parking lot (otherwise occupied by large, heavy, very specialized trucks and other units, but Walmart kept about one row of spaces for their customers, which is being shared with Walmart's own freezer trucks and a mechanical fork lift truck which someone drives around getting things out of the freezer trucks. Most of the store is still dark; the generators cannot light the entire place as Walmart would like, and although they say they are 'open for business' when we went by there this morning, 'business' amounted to perhaps two or three customers around some taped off registers and most of the store sort of a gray color from the skylights which were letting in sun light and the few overhead lights the generators were able to deal with in addition to serving the computers, the phone system and the freezers.
Who I really feel sorry for out there is Dr. Epp and his veternary clinic/hospital. The poor animals must have really suffered in the heat over the weekend, although I saw a generator parked in _his_ parking area this morning; but a sign said 'kennel is closed at this time, elective surgery (i.e. getting your dogs and cats 'fixed') is cancelled, please re-schedule; emergencies only at this time. And the local animal shelter is a couple blocks away. They are also categorized as a 'business' which put them sort of low on the totem-pole of the Westar emergency repairs. :( Over here on the east side of town, we sit here in relative ease and comfort today. PAT]