Thousands of people throughout eastern Pennsylvania have struggled to get by without electricity following Friday’s devastating nor’easter.

Tammy Lewullis of Effort is not one of them.

Make no mistake, Lewullis did lose her power, but along with her family, she has more than made due.

“There’s always a way to survive. They didn’t have electricity during the pioneer days, but they survived,” Lewullis said.

While the Lewullis family wasn’t completely prepared for the hard-hitting storm, they were quickly able to get their home back in order after the outages.

“I don’t think you can ever be ‘ready’ ready. It hits you with a shock when you find you’re going to be losing your power for a while, but then you sit back and think about how the forefathers, or in my case, foremothers, got by without it,” she said.

The pioneer mindset certainly helped, even if the Lewullis family utilized a few options that the settlers didn’t have.

“We’ve been able to keep the whole house warm with one kerosene heater,” Lewullis said. “I’ve kept a pot of water going on top of the heater at all times, and what we do is we refill it as we use it.”

The hot water provides a breakfast of coffee and oatmeal. Lewullis said that she has also cooked dinners on top of the heater, including a batch of mashed potatoes and some burgers. Cast-iron cookware is preferable to use, as it holds heat longer than stainless steel.

As for food storage, Lewullis said she will be borrowing a generator from her brother on Monday, as his power has been restored. But, even if that hadn’t panned out, she had a clever backup plan.

“I was actually going to mound up the snow, make a hole in the center of it, store the food and cover it with a tarp,” she said.

Fortunately, the generator came at just the right time, as Lewullis needs to keep her insulin in cold storage for it to remain effective.

In order to keep the toilets going, the family collected and melted snow.

Of course, a means of communication is an absolute necessity these days, so Lewullis said her husband set up a rig connecting a surge protector to their truck. This provides a bit of power for necessities, including a laptop so that Lewullis’ daughter can continue her home schooling.

As it turns out, Lewullis has gone through plenty of winters with outages, managing to get by just fine. When she was a child, it wasn’t uncommon for the electricity to be out for weeks at a time. In the past few years, Lewullis went through an ice storm and Hurricane Sandy, both of which knocked out her power for days a time.

But, of course, this never fazed her.

Lewullis thanks her mother and her resolute spirit for helping her to keep a cool head and manage the major issues when an emergency strikes. It’s just a matter of taking a moment to be practical, she said, and she hopes that some of her advice can benefit others when they run into similar problems.

“It’s just a matter of saying, “OK, I can do this,” and being strong enough to do it,” she said.

John and Mary Ann Hazel of Palmerton also got inventive by warming pizza on a kerosene heater.

“Not our first power outage. Thankful for kerosene, batteries, thermoses and neighbors with power,” John Hazel said.

Many people fired up their gas grill. Tonya Weiss of Chestnuthill Township had a complete steak dinner and melted snow to wash the dishes.