Do you have an evacuation plan?
Yes. After Irene we purchased a generator. After Sandy, I now keep 20 gallons of gasoline in the detached garage to run the generator and I keep a Go-bag beside our bed.
I try to revisit and update the go-bag every six months but in reality it's usually closer to every 9 months. I planned the contents with the idea that our home suffers a causality that causes us to evacuate immediately. The idea is we may shelter in a car, municipal shelter, etc for a night or day and then move to a hotel for a week or two before securing leased housing.
I assume the first 24 hours we are pretty much on our own. I have some water, pajamas for the kids, diapers, powered formula, cash, a credit card, copies of our passports, insurance policies, etc. It also contains instant coffee and a Sterno (I have to have coffee), contact lenses, and a few days supply of my blood pressure medicine and a copy of the script. I also have phone chargers in there.
Regarding shelterng-in-place I have laid down potable water - but I have not rotated it. I have plastic, duct tape, electric heaters, etc. What I am missing is pre-cut plywood to board up a window or two. My BIL had a tree crash through his sons's bedroom window during Sandy. His neighbor had pre-cut pieces of plywood which were pressed into service in the middle of the night to close up the window as the storm raged outside.
This thread is a great reminder - we changed auto insurance companies this week. I need to update the go-bag.
alias said:
Yes. After Irene we purchased a generator. After Sandy, I now keep 20 gallons of gasoline in the detached garage to run the generator
You should rotate the gas too, it can degrade after a few months.
Thanks, Alias. I think the one thing I'll do first whenever I get around to making my own plan will be to put important documents and medication into a go-bag. Yours sounds very well equipped.
I do. I use stabil to extend he life and rotate the gas (the old stuff goes in the car every six to nine months...so far no ill affect).
alias said:
I do. I use stabil to extend he life and rotate the gas (the old stuff goes in the car every six to nine months...so far no ill affect).
That should be fine, especially with the fuel stabilizer in it. I would just worry about someone who might store gas for a couple of years and then have the generator run like crap when they need it most.
We purchased a generator and had a transfer switch put in when we moved in just after Sandy. We have 2 5-gallon gas cans full of gas in our garage. Every Labor Day weekend, I empty the gas containers into our cars and get the containers refilled and I put Sta-Bil in them.
We have Poland Spring dispenser so we should never be out of drinking water between the Poland Spring containers that we have on hand at any given point and the ability to boil water.
Copies of all important docs are on Dropbox. Plenty of flashlights and batteries on hand. Since we have a master bedroom in our attic, we have long-enough fire ladder in our closet up there.
What else am I forgetting?
Great thread.
Our Council provides handy guides and a nifty waterproof wallet for free (you can get as many as you want, I currently have a spare 200) as we're subject to flash flooding etc.
their disaster page might help you with your checklist.
http://www.goldcoast.qld.gov.au/community-disaster-guide-2906.html
Here's a list of helpful hints I compiled from MOL after Sandy for a friend who was doing an emergency response plan.
Some lessons learned in New Jersey: To store utility water (for flushing, etc.), use contractor-weight garbage bags in garbage cans. For drinking water, use gallon-size ziplock bags. They can be emptied and reused later. Keep your emergency water supply for a week or so after services have been restored in case of a relapse. Get a land-line (copper wire) phone. They often keep working when all other services have failed. Consider getting a dial-up modem and have an account that supports dial-up. Cable/Internet service can be out for weeks, and cell phone service suffers when towers go down. Keep your car's gas tank full if you know a big storm is coming. Have gas cans on hand. Know how to transfer gas out of your car's tank into a can or another car. They sell gadgets for this in auto parts stores. Have all laundry done and the dishwasher run before the storm hits and the power goes out. If you plan on sleeping elsewhere in the house (it's common here to sleep in the living room or basement during big storms because of trees crashing through the roof into second-floor bedrooms), inflate the bed before the power goes out. Have a gas water heater that doesn't require electricity for ignition or for operating the vent. It will keep operating indefinitely in a power outage. If you have an automatic garage door opener, disengage it before the power goes out, especially if that's where you keep the generator, your car, or emergency supplies. Flashlights are plentiful in the stores here, but there are no D batteries anywhere. Get headlamp flashlights. You can do things while wearing one. Get a Red Cross hand-crank radio that can also be used to charge phones. Figure out how you will make coffee without electricity. (Including grinding the beans.) People in cold climates with fish tanks and exotic birds -- How will you keep them warm? Keep the fish oxygenated? Our local pet store, with power, is hosting several parrots and cockatiels. (Joy says "fish tanks - have a large dutch oven that I fill with water - boil the water and place under the tank. throw every blanket we have over tank and pray. Reheat the water about every 8 hours or sooner - so far so good.") Tarps, thick plastic sheeting, furring strips, staple gun or slap hammer, duct tape, chainsaw. Paper plates/bowls, plastic cups and utensils. A manually operated pump, depending on your drainage situation. Extra sump pumps in case the installed one fails. If you have a 3G-capable iPad but have never used 3G, you will need a SIM card to use 3G. Get it now and set up a pay-as-you-go account. Mobile hotspots will not provide Internet access for many desktop computers, only other mobile devices. If the Internet goes out, will you possibly need to transfer files from your desktop to your phone, perhaps to email them somewhere? If so, figure out how in advance. (I'm on a Mac and an iPhone, and I'm using Air Sharing over my home wi-fi network.) Get a TV antenna so you can receive digital over-the-air channels if the cable goes out. Identify what electrical items you absolutely must have. In my area, the must-haves are (1) heat, (2) basement sump pumps, (3) ability to charge electronics, and (4) lights, followed by luxuries, such as a TV or a refrigerator. If it doesn't get all that cold, or if you have electric heat, consider getting kerosene or propane space heaters for emergency heat. If you live in an area where pipes will freeze, either come up with a whole-house heat solution or understand how to drain your pipes. If you have a gas- or oil-fired boiler with circulating hot water or steam, the electrical requirements are minimal and you can run the system from a generator or using deep-cycle marine batteries hooked up to solar panels or even a bicycle for recharging (or you can hook it up to your car, I've heard). Have an electrician install a transfer switch on the breaker that feeds your boiler so you can isolate the boiler from the panel and plug it directly into the generator (cost is about $400 - $500 for the transfer switch). Do it now, before you need it. Another option is a natural gas fireplace. A neighbor has one in his basement, and it keeps his whole (big) house warm. Generators get stolen. Try to locate it out of sight, and get a lock and chain to attach it to something. Have spare extension cords so you can share generator power with your neighbors. It's the best way to compensate for the noise they'll have to endure.
Since you're focusing on flow of information ... Something that seemed really bizarre to me is that the only NJ TV station is only available on cable. If your cable is out, you have no access to emergency info. I had both cable and DirecTV in my house. My cable was out for ten days. My DirecTV never flickered, but it didn't carry the NJ station, only New York news, so I was very well informed about conditions on Long Island.
It seems to me that the NJ station should be required to broadcast over the air during regional emergencies, especially given how many people are giving up cable and have over-the-air antennas.
Be careful about storing lots of gas. An alternative is to always fill your cars when they get down to half and have a siphon available. Cars are the safest storage container for gasoline, plus this automatically makes sure that it is "rotated". (We do have a couple of 2-3 gallon red gasoline containers which we would need anyway for our lawn mower and snowblower.)
kthnry said:
Since you're focusing on flow of information ... Something that seemed really bizarre to me is that the only NJ TV station is only available on cable. If your cable is out, you have no access to emergency info. I had both cable and DirecTV in my house. My cable was out for ten days. My DirecTV never flickered, but it didn't carry the NJ station, only New York news, so I was very well informed about conditions on Long Island.
It seems to me that the NJ station should be required to broadcast over the air during regional emergencies, especially given how many people are giving up cable and have over-the-air antennas.
That's an excellent point. We didn't have power during Sandy, Sotheby's lack of info fia TV hadn't even occurred to me, but I agree that there should be over-the-air broadcasts for NJ so that people can get local rather than regional info. We relied on WNYC on a battery-powered radio during Sandy, but more for company than for hard facts.
And thanks for that list of tips--some great suggestions there.
joanne said:
Great thread.
Our Council provides handy guides and a nifty waterproof wallet for free (you can get as many as you want, I currently have a spare 200) as we're subject to flash flooding etc.
their disaster page might help you with your checklist.
http://www.goldcoast.qld.gov.au/community-disaster-guide-2906.html
Ready.gov here has similar advice and helps people build their own kits, prepare go-bags, and the like. It's nicely done for the most part, but it still hasn't motivated me to make my own plan. Something like your waterproof wallets would be more on target for me--a tangible item to make it easier to get started. I'm just starting to explore ideas for creating some of the elements of an emergency kit, and I might have to steal the wallet one. 
/p>
Or other disaster preparedness/recovery plan?
I ask because I'm updating a talk I gave in 2013 about my experiences, and to some extent MOL's, during and after Sandy (specifically about the flow and presentation of information during that time), and I realize that despite all the lessons I learned as a result and my certainty that we would get a generator set up as soon as everything was back to normal...I still don't have any real plan in place. Or a generator.
So I'm wondering how many of us have formal or informal plans for either evacuating or "sheltering in place," have signed up with ready.gov, or are otherwise prepared. Anyone?