^Another demonstration of the different strategies needed for different areas of the country. In New England we would say to make sure to put your car in the garage, where it would be less likely to be crushed by falling tree limbs from a hurricane or buried in snow from a blizzard!
We’re in a new house, the old house had a whole house generator. We’re giving it some to see how often we lose power and for how long. We just lost power this weekend for a few hours. We lost power for about 10 days when he had this crazy storm called a derecho a few years ago. Then not having cash was a problem. I now stash some small bills in the house just in case.
In terms of the silver and gold and all of that…I think if it really gets to that point, I hope someone with a gun shoots me. If not, I think the real currency will be salt and spices. How do you make change for a silver fork?
When I start thinking of doomsday scenarios, I want to think about stockpiling coffee and black pepper, but I know that the lack of clean water will do us all in in less than a week anyway so I go back to better scenarios!
@Sue22: as to different startegies in different parts of country: where you probably want to keep heat on in blizzard, many of us shut off gas to house after Northridge earthquake. Also I and many others installed a device on gas meter where if an earthquake above some number (5.1?) is detected, the gas would be shut off immediately.
Wow–if folks needing supplemental O2 need to get out of town in HI, that means they will all need to be at the airport and hoping they can fly somewhere and have the funds for a hotel or somewhere, plus a provider that can get them O2 out of town and O2 for the plane.
Around here, they tell folks on supplemental O2 to make arrangements with a hospital, but that doesn’t sound like it would work well either. There are lots more folks on supplemental O2 than headroom in our hospitals. Yikes–our state just can’t have disasters!
In HI, we fortunately haven’t had need of guns in disasters, and folks have come together. People who price gouge were prosecuted and mostly folks helped one another.
Good luck with medical arrangements. When our little baby came home from the hospital, he was on a cardiac respiratory monitor 24/7. The hospital filed a letter with the utility company but really…what were they supposed to do? When we lost power, and it happened more than once…we just had to sit up with the little guy and pat him on the back.
IIRC! The thing did have a battery pack, but it only worked for a few hours…so I could do things like go grocery shopping, and take him to his follow up visits.
But geez…I’m not sure what would happen if someone needed O2 around here. During that October snowstorm we couldn’t get out of our street for three or four days…and we couldn’t get off of the hill we live on for almost a week…due to downed trees.
Yep–one can have batteries, but they only have a short duration, depending on the flow rate. I guess you could have supplemental tanks delivered in anticipation of a storm or never let the big O2 tank get lower than 1/2 filled?
These medical issues are an important reason to make sure you have a way to charge your cell phone, so you can call emergency services and try to get priority help.
It all depends where you live, for example where i live we have town water and for the likely scenarios,storms and power going out, we don’t have to worry about water, I have never had problems with water supply contamination and the like (only time that happens is usually with a water main break), but someone with a well has to worry about loss of power. Someone in an earthquake zone has different needs than someone who lives in a flood zone. It has gotten a lot better where i live since the hurricane and halloween snowstorm and then Sandy, when we had extensive power outages, in my area they have done a lot of work on trees and such so that we have had maybe a couple of 1 hour outages. Still, with how crazy the weather is, as soon as I can I want to get a full backup generator (or at the least, a portable generator big enough to power critical circuits that runs off natural gas as well as gasoline), i have a small generator that can run my sump pump already.
Other things people have mentioned, emergency cash, tarps (wonderful things, in the bag they don’t take up much space, are pretty cheap, can be bought over time, and when you need them, cand o a lot), duct tape, bungee cords and some decent lengths of rope, buckets and mops (to clean up). For winter, having wood for the fireplace that can last is a good thing, a snow rake for the roof if you get a huge number of snowstorms. Sleeping backs that are designed for camping on cold weather can be very handy if the heat goes out. If you like coffee, a stove top percolator/camp percolator which can be used on a stove (if you have gas) or a grill. If someone in the house is taking long term medication, make sure to have an extra supply of them, so you don’t have the ‘oops, I am almost out’ when road are impassible or the mail isn’t getting through. Have some strong gear for foul weather (jacket/pants) so if you have to work outside in the rain trying to pull dead tree branches from the house or removing debris clogging a drain or whatnot, you are protected. There are certain tools I recommend having around, besides basic things like screwdrivers and hammers and a crow bar, there are shears known by various names (EMT shear is one of them), that are both sharp and strong and can be used to do a lot.
One thing other people haven’t mentioned, is to have a fully stocked first aid kit, because you may not be able to count on emergency help in a storm or whatnot and may need to help family or friends. There are some pretty good basic first aid books and videos (The Red Cross publishes one, there are also others out there) that it would be good to have on hand, and I am a big advocate of people taking time to learn basic first aid, if not through a course like the Red Cross, through video courses, it literally can save someone’s life. With a first aid kit, I am talking the more complete ones, the standard ones are good is someone has had a cut and needs a bandait. They should have a variety of bandages, splints (air splints are great to have), a triangular bandage, a good set of scissors, antibiotic cremes and steroid cremes (If you gp is ameanable, might be able to get prescription strength ones), a good pair of forceps, eyewash bottle, if anyone in the house is allergic an epi pen, painkiller like tylenol or advil , ace bandages.
If you have electric stoves, then a camp stove might be a good item, they are easier to use than a grill IME
Got off the phone from talking with the supplier of O2 in our community. They said to call them in advance or after being evacuated and let them know an address where the patients need services and they can get to them patients. The first person I spoke to was the customer service person and she was very flustered and couldn’t answer my numerous questions and transferred me to a supervisor whose answers weren’t all that comforting. Medically fragile people had best beware, I guess and plan as much and as far in advance as possible.
Hate to say it but cell phones are useless when towers are down as our were. And telephone lines were down also.
Sure wish we had underground power.
About guns in an emergency kit. They aren’t part of mine but not a bad idea. Our area was under curfew and lock down. You couldn’t come into the area without ID and proving you were a resident. It is unsettling having a policeman shine his flashlight in your face asking for ID. Looting was a real possibility in what normally is a VERY safe area. Not from the residents but from those outside the community. It did happen but not much because of heavy police presence.
With no electricity life changes after dark. Most people have NO idea what darkness is when you can’t turn on a light.
Not inside but outside. I certainly didn’t and I’d been through a lot of storms. Not just a short power outage but continued dark. It is BLACK. Can’t see your hand in front of your face black dark. There are no street lamps, no landmarks. No glimmer from across the lake. The roads you travel every day are DARK when not lit by businesses and street light.
Oxygen was a problem in our community. No oxygen service I know of held anything back when called on by the local hospitals and emergency services. It was a community effort. But I know (for us) we didn’t get expensive equipment back. It was supposed to be tracked and returned (as you would hope) but that didn’t happen for the most part.
Guess my main concern is that some people expected us to maintain the same level of service after the storm as before the storm. I don’t know why they thought we would be able to care for them when our business was as or more crippled by the storm as they were. We did our best I’m proud to say. But at times I needed to be taking care of my own family problems and not taking care of someone whom I’d already told to leave the area prior the storm.
One of the big ones is to err on the side of caution. While some people go bananas over every little thing and you can’t live like that (ie they predict 4" of snow and people are stocking up like it is a hurricane), if a storm has the potential to be a monster one, prep for it like it is, make sure you have everything where you need it, you have inventoried things, bought what you need, gotten gas, etc. One of the things people assume is they will have time, I have taken classes on disaster preparedness and being an emergency first responder, and they said things like flash floods and other things can hit in a matter of minutes, and that it can go from calm to hell just as fast. Kind of like brush fires in California, when they get a report of one they assume the worst, send max equipment to fight it, then if it is not as bad as they thought, they pull back.
Last night a twister swept through a neighborhood a few blocks from my house, damaging 39 homes. And I live in Massachusetts, not exactly tornado alley.
Unfortunately, it might become one, @Sue22, as scary as that is to imagine. As another New Englander, we’ve had more tornados in the past few years it seems than I can remember for many decades prior.
That must have been pretty scary.
@doschicos,
One resident described it as “an ungodly noise”.
My parents were married in the middle of the 1953 Worcester tornado of that killed 94 people and left around 10,000 homeless. It was the 21st most deadly tornado in the history of the US. The wedding was in Williamstown and most of the guests drove out from Boston. Had the wedding taken place a little earlier or a little later in the day half the people they were close to would have been in the path of the storm on their way to or from the festivities.
We have underground utility lines. The issues Re not with the lines that come to you house, usually. The issues are with substations…and those are above ground. During that October snowstorm,me were without power for days…even though we have underground wires.
Oh…and during that summer power outage bout 15 years ago, there was damage to the lines to our house. It took days for the utility company to fix…and if we had above ground lines, it would,have been an easy find and fix.
We have underground lines. Still lost power for 8 days during our last major hurricane.
At least with underground lines you don’t have to worry about downed lines possibly being live in your yard and immediate area.