Learning from Alabama disaster

[Wisconsin Ann]

From the posts that Angie has managed to get through to us, even tho she says that the headlamp is her best friend...I'm seeing a constant thread in her posts (and others from the disaster area)....energy..electricity.

In order to charge your cellphone, to keep medicine cold, lights...you need a source of electricity. To get your message out..you need electricity in today's world.

Tornado goes through and misses your house...but ALL power lines are down and likely will be down for weeks. Moving around on roads is impossible at first, then slowly gets better..but now you need fuel for your vehicle.

I can see a number of things that would be EXTREMELY valuable for someone to have in this current situation...solar powered items, for example. Leave the lights out in the daylight until you need them at night. Plug your battery charger into the solar panel all day.

A GENERATOR!!! One Honda 2200 generator would give you power to put a freezer to use as a "cooler"...on for an hour and cold enough to keep meds cold and meat from decaying. (that's what we do out at the farm..freezer is used as a fridge)

Personally...I'd have a diesel generator before gasoline, but that's a personal choice.

What else are people here seeing that is a truly valuable preparation for this sort of disaster?


(oh yes...all valuable papers not just in a box, but in a box buried in a concrete hole in the back yard or basement, I'm thinking. AND copies elsewhere...family member in another state, perhaps.

[prairiecomforts]

Yes - having power or not having power in this case can be a huge deal! We had an experience of our own last spring when a late ice storm came throught and knocked out power to our area for over 23 days. (Thousands of power lines had to be replaced.) We ran our geni only to keep the fridge and freezer doing. Had candles, flashlights, laterns (battery and handcrank) for light. (after the first week, went to town and got a cheap set of the solat pathway lights so the kids had their own "nightlight" in their rooms and in the bathroom.) I cooked on the propane grill - just keep meals very simple. And to be honest with you - things actually went pretty well. We entertained our selves in the evening by playing board games and telling stories. We ate farily well since we had simple meals to prepare from the pantry. Kept warm by the woodstove. Only one little catch to the system. I realized that I hadn't done much to prepare for washing clothes on a reg. basis without power! (that has since been fixed with the purchase of a washboard, 2 tubs and a couple of drying racks.)

I am sending everyone down south lots of hugs! And hope that power is restored quickly to them.

[julieq]

Angie's posts have been really informative. We went out yesterday and purchased an inverter for our truck so we will be able to charge the battery in our laptop if we need to. We'll be looking for headlamps as DH said that was a great idea. We already have a generator, extra fuel, etc. and are pretty well prepared, but the posts helped us take a good hard look for gaps.

However, our oldest DD lives in an apartment in Huntsville (not far from Angie) with our two year old GD. Although she was raised in our home, where preparedness was taught, she was totally unprepared. She was able to text on her phone before the battery failed and said she had candles only, no flashlight, a radio but no batteries, no extra baby food, a can of yams and a loaf of bread for herself and no car charger for her phone, etc. We went shopping yesterday and got a huge box 'care package' sent out two day FedEx, a second box FedEx ground. Just praying they are able to deliver them. For what we spent just in FedEx charges, she could have been very well prepared to weather the current power outage and lack of open stores (and we'd have helped her financially if she would have listened to our promptings).

Hopefully we'll all continue to be encouraged to fill in gaps in our preps and at the same time others (like our DD) will take prepping more seriously.

[Forerunner]

The most valuable commodity to me is/would be a very remote location.

It is good to see the reports of those who are coming to the aid of the devastated areas with water, tp and other needfuls, but such charity is not always the case.
A lot of space between my wrecked farm and the masses would be just fine with me.
A lot of space between my wrecked farm and marauding military/law enforcement who come through to "help" by forcibly removing me from my land and provision is even better.

Electricity is a mirage. Plan to do without it as you make what use of it that you can.

[Cyngbaeld]

It was heartbreaking to read of someone's destroyed home being picked over by looters. I she had kept her valuables in a safer location she wouldn't have lost them. Also photos should be copied to disk and multiple copies stored off site.

Another biggy is water. I have a 1500 gal poly tank that has really saved the day multiple times. I always top it off when the water comes back on.

[Harry Chickpea]

Those were lessons learned in Florida years ago. A tornado outbreak like this wreaks total devastation in relatively small areas. Hurricanes have embedded tornadoes and wreak lesser widespread devastation that can be even harder to repair because of loss of all nearby infrastructure. Huntsville proper will have most power back within a week. When Wilma went through, we lost power for eleven days and were expecting it to be longer.

The big lesson is STORM SHELTER. That silly urban legend of mobile homes being tornado magnets and the only thing destroyed in tornadoes is hopefully a casualty of these storms. It was obvious to all that brick houses, gas stations, even parts of municipal structures were no match for the winds and wind blown debris.

If anything, storms like this make manufactured housing seem MORE sensible. Why spend lots of money and effort on a big home when it will be blown away?

Looters. I'm dismayed that the problem is as large as it is. Word on the news last night was of a woman trapped in gas station rubble who could hear the looters, and those looters left her where she was. I carry.

Electricity and water. For me, this has been a no-brainer since I was a kid. Although power was out after Wilma for eleven days, our house never was without electricity. A combination of generator, batteries, inverter and charger kept us going for the eleven day on less than fifteen gallons of gas. I was even using electric chain saws to cut up debris.

Having a plan B. In south Florida, many folks left BEFORE a hurricane. Apartment and condo dwellers were better off out of the area. Those who were unprepared and tried to stay suffered the most, then left.

Insurance. The best advice I can give anyone with insurance is "public adjuster." Do NOT take an insurance company adjuster at face value. Some are incompetent, some will try to minimize the damage so that the company pays less. If you hire a public adjuster that is skilled in building trades, that adjuster will be on your side and negotiate the proper settlement amount. That battle with insurance companies can be as frustrating as the storm event itself. You will either be dropped or paying a higher rate from this point forward, so get what is due you before you have to deal with that.

Loss of income. If your job if affected, you'll have to resist spending to make things right immediately. Do what is prudent, and spread the cost over a longer time.

Gasoline. Again, the long lines are lines of people without foresight. The same with water. One of the more infuriating things I've seen in a disaster was a woman in south Florida, who was dragging her kids into a long line in the sun to get water - the day after Wilma hit. She couldn't have had a soda bottle or two of water filled from the tap before the storm? ALL the media had been telling people to have three days of supplies on hand, and she had to bake her kids in the sun because she was so STUPID??? I have no patience with such lack of thought.

When you get down to basic reality of nature - those who went into underground shelter survived the tornadoes. Those who prepared with gas and water and generators had gas and water and power after. There is a tragedy in the loss of life and the injuries, and it only is worse when you realize that much of that suffering and death was preventable.

To anyone who lives in tornado country and has a big screen tv and no storm shelter, now is the time to question your priorities.

[TooManyHobbies!]

Some musings...

1) Light: The headlamps are wonderful. Get the ones that use triple A batteries. Use rechargeables & keep spares around. Set up IN ADVANCE to be able to recharge these with solar (you can also recharge off your car, but you won't want to use the fuel to do this). You can charge them some by putting them into the solar pathway lights, but you won't get as strong of a charge. Speaking of solar path lights, get a few of them. They can be brought inside at night. If you have six or eight of these in a room they give a fair amount of light for evening tasks. Get the ones with an on-off switch so they don't burn all night, using your stored power. Solar charged flashlights are also good OR use rechargeable batteries w/ a solar charging station.

2) keep every nook and cranny of your freezer full of soda bottles full of water. This will help your frozen food last longer and you can drink the water as needed, too. Rain barrels are great, too. PLenty of other options are available everywhere, so I won't belabor this.

3) Camp stove -- get one that runs off propane. You want one that brings water to a boil in a minute or two. Hot drinks are vital to staying warm in a cold weather disaster PLUS you can purify water if needed. Obviously, keep enough propane on hand. If you are in the market for buying a bbq grill, get one with a side burner. I can't understand why people don't pay $25 more for this added functionality if they are spending that much, anyway. Likewise, it's easier to store fuel for a propane cooking system than for a charcoal grill. It also sends up less evidence that you have a way to cook. I also have a small cookstove that runs off unleaded gasoline OR kerosene. I'm rather scared of that thing, but would use it if needed.

[Wags]

Off site storage of important papers and photos = Carbonite for me. It is in a different state and automatically backs up and encrypts everything I save to my hard drive and the cost is less than $5 a month. I do have hard copies of most of my pictures as well - in professionally printed photo books so I do have access to all but the most recent pictures in case of a long term power outage.

For an evacuation/home destruction scenario you can also set up a web based email like gmail and then email things like your resume, pictures of your home for insurance etc. Then you will have access to them wherever you have access to a functioning computer. Oh and send at least one copy to yourself as PDF's so that they can be opened at any computer.

We are pretty well set up for flashlights but after reading Angie's post I'm thinking we need some headlamps as well. A generator to run the pump is on the list to get when we get our tax return this year. One of those 12volt ice chests is also on the list to keep the goat milk chilled.

[Bearfootfarm]

Why spend lots of money and effort on a big home when it will be blown away?

Because a well built home will stand up to much more wind than any "mobile" home.

An F1 tornado can roll a trailer across a field while only tearing a few shingles off a real house

Just because real homes CAN be destroyed is no reason to go with something much weaker.

The thing I'm learning from this is everyone should have some underground storage or shelter

It won't matter how many gallons of water you have in an ABOVE ground tank if you suffer a direct hit from a strong tornado.

All the "preps" in the world are useless if they are scattered over half the county.

I'm thinking about burying some 50 gallon plastic barrels to hold emergency supplies and possibly water, leaving just the lids above ground.

If I had lots of money to spend, I'd do an underground room AWAY from the house or any big trees, large enough for a few people to ride out a storm

[myheaven]

Learn to build a sall wood fired stove for cooking and heating water like a 3 brick stove or rocket stove. after a twister you will have plenty of debris to burn for cooking. My not have propane for your camp stove.

our weak link is enough water for all the animals. we do have lots of ponds and such very close but if they are contaminated from the storms then the water isnt good for them. We plan to remidy that in the next few weeks with a waer tank burried.

The ability to keep things cool without power. the book "how to live without electricity and like' it has a great chapter on it. I learned alot.

I see i need to get texting back. if thats the only way to get communications out ill be SOL

[Txsteader]

Originally Posted by Bearfootfarm

Because a well built home will stand up to much more wind than any "mobile" home.

An F1 tornado can roll a trailer across a field while only tearing a few shingles off a real house

Just because real homes CAN be destroyed is no reason to go with something much weaker.

The thing I'm learning from this is everyone should have some underground storage or shelter

It won't matter how many gallons of water you have in an ABOVE ground tank if you suffer a direct hit from a strong tornado.

All the "preps" in the world are useless if they are scattered over half the county.

I'm thinking about burying some 50 gallon plastic barrels to hold emergency supplies and possibly water, leaving just the lids above ground.

If I had lots of money to spend, I'd do an underground room AWAY from the house or any big trees, large enough for a few people to ride out a storm

Sonshine mentioned this in the other thread. I agree that some type of bunker would certainly save a lot of preps. Here, because our water table is so high, we'd have to do some type of above-ground, sod-covered bunker.

[RebelDigger]

Well, after two days of tornado above, around and both sides of us (thankfully none went through us) I have just upped the anty on the root cellar situation. I had posted a thread before, I believe on HT about putting in a small root cellar under the kitchen of the house we are restoring. Nix that. We live on a ridgetop and there is a perfectly good, gentle downward slope behind the house in the woods. That is where I am having a spot dug for a two room root cellar. The back room will be the root cellar and the front room will be a storm shelter. Most of my preps will go in there, the pantry in the kitchen will also be stocked but, don't want all the eggs in one basket. The old cistern under the back porch is being put back into use and I had already planned on having both electric and hand pumps on it. We have a generator. Is there any reason not to put freezers in the root cellar? That way they and their valuable contents would be safe from getting blown away.

[Harry Chickpea]

"Because a well built home will stand up to much more wind than any "mobile" home.

An F1 tornado can roll a trailer across a field while only tearing a few shingles off a real house

Just because real homes CAN be destroyed is no reason to go with something much weaker."

I understand that point of view and agree that it has validity, although I think we might stand up to a small F3 at our place, due to placement and external protections as well as the type of construction. I know that tornadoes will dip into gullies, but I see a LOT of older cabins around here that were built in gullies. When you are on flat land, trees can be deadly. When you combine a substantial dip in the land and trees, I have to think there is more protection and the oldsters knew what they were doing.

Anyway, my greater thought though was one of people understanding risks and acting appropriately. I railed against the mansions built in Florida that were placed on barrier islands. Not because of the (sometimes beautiful) stupidity of placing a valued object in harms way, but because those homes raised insurance rates for everyone. I also think that stewardship of money is more important than following a crowd without thought. Another example of that: When I was working in theatres and the companies were unstable, I knew to rent a cheap apartment because that was what was most practical for the few hours spent there, especially with frequent moves possible. Build or rent in a manner appropriate to the environment.

I do have to improve access to our storm shelter. This last outbreak had put 6" of rainwater in the entrance path.

[insocal]

I keep important documents (copies) stored online in "the cloud" via Dropbox. Then my home PC and office laptop also have the same stuff on their hard drives. All my business financial records, all my family photos, the works. So my home could burn, or the office be hit by a crashing plane, and I would still have everything.

I have a flat scanner type printer/copier/scanner that allows me to scan paper docs and then the digital copy is all I need. Oh, and my decades of old business records scanned to images are burned onto a CD, too.

http://www.dropbox.com/

Even if your computers all go down, you can access your files online from any computer in the world with internet access. I wouldn't want to live without it.

[Sonshine]

Originally Posted by Harry Chickpea

Those were lessons learned in Florida years ago. A tornado outbreak like this wreaks total devastation in relatively small areas. Hurricanes have embedded tornadoes and wreak lesser widespread devastation that can be even harder to repair because of loss of all nearby infrastructure. Huntsville proper will have most power back within a week. When Wilma went through, we lost power for eleven days and were expecting it to be longer.

The big lesson is STORM SHELTER. That silly urban legend of mobile homes being tornado magnets and the only thing destroyed in tornadoes is hopefully a casualty of these storms. It was obvious to all that brick houses, gas stations, even parts of municipal structures were no match for the winds and wind blown debris.

If anything, storms like this make manufactured housing seem MORE sensible. Why spend lots of money and effort on a big home when it will be blown away?

Looters. I'm dismayed that the problem is as large as it is. Word on the news last night was of a woman trapped in gas station rubble who could hear the looters, and those looters left her where she was. I carry.

Electricity and water. For me, this has been a no-brainer since I was a kid. Although power was out after Wilma for eleven days, our house never was without electricity. A combination of generator, batteries, inverter and charger kept us going for the eleven day on less than fifteen gallons of gas. I was even using electric chain saws to cut up debris.

Having a plan B. In south Florida, many folks left BEFORE a hurricane. Apartment and condo dwellers were better off out of the area. Those who were unprepared and tried to stay suffered the most, then left.

Insurance. The best advice I can give anyone with insurance is "public adjuster." Do NOT take an insurance company adjuster at face value. Some are incompetent, some will try to minimize the damage so that the company pays less. If you hire a public adjuster that is skilled in building trades, that adjuster will be on your side and negotiate the proper settlement amount. That battle with insurance companies can be as frustrating as the storm event itself. You will either be dropped or paying a higher rate from this point forward, so get what is due you before you have to deal with that.

Loss of income. If your job if affected, you'll have to resist spending to make things right immediately. Do what is prudent, and spread the cost over a longer time.

Gasoline. Again, the long lines are lines of people without foresight. The same with water. One of the more infuriating things I've seen in a disaster was a woman in south Florida, who was dragging her kids into a long line in the sun to get water - the day after Wilma hit. She couldn't have had a soda bottle or two of water filled from the tap before the storm? ALL the media had been telling people to have three days of supplies on hand, and she had to bake her kids in the sun because she was so STUPID??? I have no patience with such lack of thought.

When you get down to basic reality of nature - those who went into underground shelter survived the tornadoes. Those who prepared with gas and water and generators had gas and water and power after. There is a tragedy in the loss of life and the injuries, and it only is worse when you realize that much of that suffering and death was preventable.

To anyone who lives in tornado country and has a big screen tv and no storm shelter, now is the time to question your priorities.

I agtree with the storm shelter being a biggie. Also extra gas. Just talked to a friend in Alabama, he's in Phil Campbell right now with the National Guard. There's only one gas station standing and they have managed to get power to it, BUT, they are only letting emergency vehicles get gas right now. Needless to say, the people that are there aren't happy about that. So if you have a gas powered generator, extra gas is a must.

[Holinessman]

I live in Central Alabama and the destruction is unbelievable. I took three truck loads of water, food, and clothing to part of the effected area today. The most important lesson I have taken from this disaster is this: you can't depend on the government to do anything helpful. The National Guard stopped me twice and told me I would have to leave. Then when I got there we couldn't distribute any food to people who needed it. We had to drop it off at the shelter and leave. I realize that there have been looters and they are trying to keep people out, but what about people trying to help?

[KMA1]

After seeing all the devastation first hand, since it narrowly missed us, I am going to build a storm shelter/storage/root cellar under ground. We have talked about it for a while, but I am moving it up in our priority. That is really about the only thing we are really missing.

[willbuck1]

JulieQ, a DC charger for your devices is much more efficient than running an inverter.

The biggest lesson I've gotten from it is always have SMS available. 9/11 and these tornadoes have shown is it is the form of communication of last resort for most non-hams. It will get through when the towers are too overloaded for a voice call.

[AngieM2]

Originally Posted by Holinessman

I live in Central Alabama and the destruction is unbelievable. I took three truck loads of water, food, and clothing to part of the effected area today. The most important lesson I have taken from this disaster is this: you can't depend on the government to do anything helpful. The National Guard stopped me twice and told me I would have to leave. Then when I got there we couldn't distribute any food to people who needed it. We had to drop it off at the shelter and leave. I realize that there have been looters and they are trying to keep people out, but what about people trying to help?

you must be more towards Tuscaloosa, I hear they are really bad.
Today while working at the site, I must have had 3 or 4 or more people bringing in bag lunches and water and such. Maybe they have to have different rules down there.
I do know you have to have your credientials to get into the area. So make sure you have them.
And neighbors are helping neighbors up where my aunts trailer was, is.

Thank you for your working to help others.

[Ann-NWIowa]

When we rebuilt after being wiped out by a tornado, we planned a shelter area under the front step. There is a cement cap over the foundation that goes under the step. Always thought it would be nearly 100% safe but a recent tornado near here stripped that cap off another house. Still I figure its 100% better than not being in the basement under the cement cap. We store our camping lanterns, flash lights, battery radio & extra batteries, bottled water in that area. Also, have room for our bob and other items we grab as we go down stairs. We keep a couple chairs to sit on in the shelter. We spent a long evening in our shelter earlier this month.