My name is Christopher Riggs. I live in Chimney Rock, North Carolina, with my wife and two daughters, and I coach football at our local high school.

After 20-plus years at the state’s largest semiconductor plant, working my way up from sweeping floors to lead technician, my job was sold overseas to the lowest bidder. With inflation and power bills squeezing every paycheck, we sacrificed to build our own safety net: a few solar panels, a secondhand wood stove, a garden and elk from the forest.

Then, on September 27th, 2024, Hurricane Helene tore through our home. For weeks we had no power, no help and no way to escape.

Until one day in late October, when I found my father’s old Vietnam footlocker floating in my flooded basement. Underneath his faded photos was a tattered folder and a set of laminated cards. My dad had been a founding member of Operation Phoenix Watt, a once-classified program built to keep military batteries running in the worst conditions imaginable.

On the front of each card: the exact sequence to revive even the most “unchargeable” batteries. On the back: a formula for watt stacking, a way to turn revived batteries into portable power stations.

I simplified the steps with my factory background and went to work on a corroded car battery that hadn’t held a charge in over a decade. The meter needle jumped to full. Then I wired it to a space heater using the watt stacking method and carried both into the freezing room where my children slept. A hum, a crackle, an orange glow, and warm air rolled across my sleeping kids.

By sunrise I had a small army of resurrected batteries: two car batteries, three lithium-ions, an ATV battery, a stack of AAs, Cs and Ds, even an old laptop battery. By noon the mountain echoed with chainsaws and power tools. That night, lights came on in the houses that were still standing.

When the grid came back four months later, most of us never hooked up again. Since then, 42,580 families have used the step-by-step system we call Last Battery.