after hurricane sandy...lessons learned.

[Mistwalker]

Good post Jay, and good discussion started. As many times as I've read through this I could have sworn I replied but apparently not. The last time I went through an actual hurricane I was only ten and my father dealt with all the prep. I have a lot of thoughts on them based on data collected after other severe storms here, but no practical experience as an adult so always good to read the thoughts and experiences of others.

Urban survival isn't pretty, neither is human nature in many cases. But part of survival is eliminating unnecessary risk.

I agree. Looking at situations like the one created by Katrina is enough to convince one of the viability of preemptive actions.

 

[lwt210]

I was a little ahead of the curve back last year when the tornadoes tore through Alabama.

As far as gas is concerned, I keep two five gallon safety cans slam full of non ethanol gas with stabilizer. I recommend the steel safety cans for a couple of reasons: they seem to seal much better than the plastic ones I used to have and I trust them more carrying gas in the car. We are close to a nuke plant and having ten gallons on hand for bugging the family out is part of our plan.

We also keep gas in both cars. 1/2 tank mark is our empty mark. We top off often. If we had to flee, we can get well away fast while others stand in gas lines.

Our power was out for a week as well. We had plenty of gas and some cash on hand when the juice stopped flowing. Our nuke plant had to shut down due to safety protocol when the twisters took out their main lines. Having cash was huge....when the one grocery store close to us did open the following day (on generator power), point of sale swipers were down and they were only taking cash. While others sought out ATMs that were up (and it took a while but they did manage to get some up in town but lines were huge), my wife and son were shopping away and were back home soon.

Our water never went out but it almost did. As soon as we lost power, I went straight to the tub, taped off the drain, and filled it. Then, while the water was flowing away, I went out to our recycle bin and raided it of all the 2 liter bottles. Once filled, we were good to go for several days.

I have a dozen led flashlights and all are stoked with Energizer Lithium batts and Surefire batts. My son had a bunch too. We had plenty of light.

The one thing I didn't have was a small radio. We had to find and use my son's radio which took four aa batts. I need to order a smaller one.

I had an inverter in my patrol car and a personal inverter for the family rides. Cell phones were useless in the first day or two but for some reason texting was pretty good. I don't text but did so during the event to let my wife know updates. Having an inverter allowed me to charge them, charge my son's Gameboy thingie, and other things that needed a charge.

Gas, cash, water, food, radio, flashlights, inverter.........

And ammo. Have ammo. Have plenty. We had looting....mostly at stores but had it gone on longer we would have had home invasions. Nobody here ever got hungry so the looting was the usual suspects just taking advantage of the situation. But had true hunger set in, it would not have been pretty. We did have one looter shot and killed by a store owner which cut down on the looting some, particularly at that store.

I will say that having a grill and charcoal on hand as well as cast iron cookware was a big help too. We grilled out every night and ate well. My son was particularly fond of the scrambled eggs cooked on cast iron. Buy some and season it.

 

[Jackfish]

Interesting read of your personal experiences. An interesting read on the topic is the Sarajevo Survival Guide. A few days or weeks without power etc. makes it all the more amazing to hear about those people who survived urban environments for 4 years under seige. Simple things like the value of a functioning bic lighter vs anything you wanted to trade for it.... The list and lessons are long.

 

[Hammer67]

I think the single best tip for urban survival I've ever heard is - Move to country. Now.

 

[Jackfish]

I think the single best tip for urban survival I've ever heard is - Move to country. Now.

I live in the country and am surrounded by abundant wood and wild game. I am also approx. 40 km from the nearest town. Trust me in an infrastructure breakdown this has many upsides, but almost as many downsides. It's easy to say you will grow gardens, hunt animals etc. but these things require seeds, ammunition, skills which cannot be easily obtained after the breakdown. Don't get me wrong I wouldn't trade places with the urbanites in a real situation, but its not an easy road in the wild either.

 

[Hammer67]

It's easy to say you will grow gardens, hunt animals etc. but these things require seeds, ammunition, skills which cannot be easily obtained after the breakdown. Don't get me wrong I wouldn't trade places with the urbanites in a real situation, but its not an easy road in the wild either.

I'm not saying any of it is easy, regardless of where you are. But in general, the fewer humans the better, and I would say that there are far more rural people who are used to dealing with not having power, with hunting, with building up survival stores, etc. and who aren't going to give in to panic as quickly as a lot of urbanites, who are used to having everything available all the time, will.

 

[Jackfish]

I like the idea of (although I haven't done it yet so as not to get that look from my wife) picking a weekend in the cool spring or fall here in Canada (not an exercise that would be viable in the dead of winter here) and pulling the power breaker for the entire weekend. No power no powered gas furnace, no stove, no tv, and worst of all no way to Google all those small tidbits of information we have become so dependant on.

 

[Hammer67]

I like the idea of (although I haven't done it yet so as not to get that look from my wife) picking a weekend in the cool spring or fall here in Canada (not an exercise that would be viable in the dead of winter here) and pulling the power breaker for the entire weekend. No power no powered gas furnace, no stove, no tv, and worst of all no way to Google all those small tidbits of information we have become so dependant on.

Where I live that's usually guaranteed to happen a few times every winter.

I also lived in rural Chile for a few years. It really drove home for me how much of the "mass freak-out" in a disaster is entirely unnecessary and avoidable with the right attitude and prep. The power would go out all the time. We had to drive 17 miles into town to use the internet, and most of time you'd get there and it wasn't working. Sometimes, the ship that brought groceries to the nearest port wouldn't be able to do so for extended periods of time due to extreme weather. When this happened, the shelves in the grocery store would go empty. I never saw people freak out about any of this. Ever. It was part of life for them, and they dealt with it just fine. There was no hysteria and the world didn't come to a screeching halt.

Unfortunately, that is a different culture, and our N. American culture - particularly in heavily populated suburban/urban areas, will probably never attain that level of rational acceptance of the realities of life, and the finite limitations of resource-based infrastructure. That is, until there is no other option.

 

[DOC-CANADA]

Thanks for starting this thread, JV3. Certainly one of the more valuable threads to appear in here for awhile. As to cutting in the gas line, I think that's not a good survival strategy. Obviously, though, Your Mileage Does Vary.

might be a voltage thing, my Dad had some old AA powered CB radios that used ni-cads, or alkylines, but you had to put in two dummy batteries if you were using the alkys, as they would over-volt the circuits if you used the full number.

The reason for that is that Ni-Cads are 1.2 volt whereas, regular AAs are 1.5 Volts - 10 NiCads are 12 volts which is what those hand held CB's needed - 10 AA Alkalines, for example, are 15 volts, therefore with 2 dummies, it left you with 8, 1.5 volt batteries or 12 volts.

Doc

 

[Jackfish]

True Smithhammer. I did a two year hitch of service in a remote part of northern Saskatchewan ( they only got a year round road in around 1987). I was stationed there in the Y2K frenzy and it was funny how nothing changed up there. I always joked that if the world ended it would take at least a month before anyone up there found out about it. When trees fell on power lines up there, repairs could take two days so we always had oil lamps around and got used to it. Since we lived so far from groceries we always bought bulk when we made the trip to civilization so we always knew we had food stores. Once out of that environment it's easy to backslide and forget what it was like there.

 

[Balldboy]

We rarely hope for the best so as the storm approached we started to prepare:

Moved sand bags to the front yard to divert water away from the house.

Batteries in all the flashlights were check, flashlights were then placed in each vehicle and in each room.

My wife makes a sort of place mat with a reflector of alum. foil for each Candle.

Changed the oil, filled and test ran the Gennie, made sure cords, surge protectors and 3 way plugs were where they belonged.

Each vehicle tank was filled along with 6 5 gal. cans and assorted smaller cans.
My work van is a 98, I can siphon from it....this time we did.
Ropes, tarps chainsaw, axes shovels and picks were all inventoried and stored nearby.

I bought 3 bags of ice on the morning of the storm, 2 for the freezer, 1 for the fridge...we needed them.

We have one huge oak that I had trimmed out before the storm...what a relief.

Since we were ready to go, I went to work on a kitchen project about 4, we lost power about an hour later...
Thank God for the ice.

I finished up and then after 4 hours it was apparent the power was not coming back any time soon.

My parent's over-bought on their Gennie...65KW...they ran it 11 hours straight on Day1 burning through half their fuel. I brought over 10gals and put them on a 2 on 4 off schedule. We back fed their panel after killing the main.

Our house we just ran some cords and supplemented the heat with propane ceramic element heaters. I'm going to have my electrician add a plug to my furnace.

We have a rental across the street, chronic drinker but never misses rent day. Even when our power was restored, he wasn't on the grid, He shared a cord with the closet neighbor...I stayed at arms length because I didn't want a couch guest. When the temp. dropped to 29, we ran 12wire to power the furnace water heater and some lights.

Some might not see this as neighborly but I would not trust him in my home so I made the decision that best suited my family's needs.

With the help of our OEM director and a lady from the local Catholic church, we opened a warming and charging station for towns folk that were still without power...amazing how many people have ZERO ability to fend for themselves.

Great lessons all around...no real damage...family is stronger for the experience.

 

[Jackfish]

A couple of winters ago my sons and I (after seeing them on some website) played around with making emergency oil lamps from empty pop cans. They worked so well we made a bunch to keep around the house. With just some "barn doors" cut not the can to open it up and act as reflectors, a couple inches of old t shirt strip or cotton sock and a couple tablespoons of olive oil or cooking oil, we were able to light the house up for the night. Nice to know in the event you run out of candles.

 

[mete]

Lots of good info here. Those that lost their homes are buying homes in the Catskill and Pocono Mtns where there are lots of homes for sale !!


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-month-anniversary-devastating-hurricane.html

And here's what the idiot politicians do to help .Maybe every month ??

 

[Sagewood]

Thanks for the write up JV3, lots of good lessons learned.

On the topic of siphoning gas from vehicles. With new vehicles, I think you will have a very difficult time siphoning gas through a line or filler tube. Like you had mentioned, most filler tubes have a check valve built into the line. Taping off the fuel filter underneath would not work either, because the gas would need to be run through the fuel pump to get up to that point. You may be able to disconnect the filler neck right at the fuel tank, and snake a hose up in there. But with vehicles being being built smaller and smaller, space for your hands is becoming a premium, and most often requires special tools to reach.

When I was a Auto Tech, we had a little trick to empty gas tanks before replacing fuel pumps. Sometimes the fuel pump was not completely dead, it just didnt have enough fuel pressure to supply the engine. So we hooked up a fuel pressure tester to the port on the fuel rail, jumpered the correct pins for the fuel pump relay, and held the bypass button on the pressure tester, and fuel flowed out of the tube, and into a fuel can.

You dont even need to have an actual fuel pressure tester to get this trick to work. There is a test port on most vehicles, alot of them are right on the fuel rail. Most will have a shrader valve inside(same as a tire stem valve). Just remove this valve(Caution: There still may be fuel pressure, so wear eye protection), and connect a hose over the valve. Then find the fuel pump relay and jumper pins 30 and 87(The pin locations are marked on the underside of the relay. Here are a couple pics I found that show what I am talking about.

You are going to want to use a good sized wire. A paper clip will just heat up and it wont work, too much amperage for that small of a wire. So, just jumper the pins, and the fuel will flow right out of the tube and into your container. Remove the wire to stop the flow. Its not a fast method, but it works. Wouldnt be a bad idea to research your own vehicle and see if it can be done.

I drive a 95 GMC Yukon, and there is no fuel tester port, so I would need to crawl under the vehicles frame rail, and disconnect the line off the fuel filter. This method will work just the same as mentioned above, you are just tapping off a line closer to the tank.

 

[pedropcola]

Lived in the FL panhandle for more than a decade and had numerous hurricanes meander through here or there. Only one (Ivan) hit directly and it was not good. People died, houses got taken down to their foundations. I lost roof, siding, fence, trees, etc. No power for a couple weeks but never lost water, although we drank bottled exclusively since we had it. Lots of good information, but. Common courtesy and "being nice" go a long way. People get on edge fast and "cutting" lines is neither ethical or the right thing to do. Neither is bribing the attendant. The rationing is there for a very good reason and people who put themselves first do not contribute to a polite society and when things are in the shitter, politeness is a very good thing. Thanks for the report lots of good information.

My two cents is that generators are completely overrated unless you actually have a huge fuel supply and preferably hooked into your house's electrical system. You can kill yourself trying to keep them fed with 5 gallon cans of fuel. When I was down there I had about 15 5 gallon cans, gave the FIL a third of them and still never felt over fueled. Water and food was the priority. As much as I love my guns, you don't need that many guns or ammo, one or two with some reloads is probably more than you would ever need. Most of us have a lot more than we need and less of food and water which unlike ammo, you will use every day in that situation. The other things that came in way handy was basic construction material. Tarps, plastic sheeting, bucket cap nails (hold down the sheeting that you use to cover the holes in your roof), chainsaw and associated fuel/oil, extra gas cans, etc. I would take those things over a generator any day.

Pete

 

[charlesbjr]

Wow, great thread! Being in the middle of this hurricane definitely made me rethink what I had on hand and what I needed more of. Thankfully we did not have any damage to property, but was without power for about a week. A few friends of mine who live only 2 miles away lost their homes. I am also glad to own firearms, as you can imagine what a couple of thugs are capable of doing when the sun goes down and there is no power!

I want to store water and some food for the long term. However, are there any rules to follow when doing this? I have a lot of experience hunting, fishing, shooting and own a good amount of knives. But when it comes to being prepared, I always imagined it being in the woods, not in my own home. As such, I have plenty of survival gear, but for the mountains..........not the urban environment. I would like to store water and food and not have to be to concerned about it spoiling. But where do I start without going broke??

Thanks!

 

[Balldboy]

Wow, great thread! Being in the middle of this hurricane definitely made me rethink what I had on hand and what I needed more of. Thankfully we did not have any damage to property, but was without power for about a week. A few friends of mine who live only 2 miles away lost their homes. I am also glad to own firearms, as you can imagine what a couple of thugs are capable of doing when the sun goes down and there is no power!

I want to store water and some food for the long term. However, are there any rules to follow when doing this? I have a lot of experience hunting, fishing, shooting and own a good amount of knives. But when it comes to being prepared, I always imagined it being in the woods, not in my own home. As such, I have plenty of survival gear, but for the mountains..........not the urban environment. I would like to store water and food and not have to be to concerned about it spoiling. But where do I start without going broke??

Thanks!

I look at my preps as sort of a store within our house. I know what we like eat and what hygiene items we use regularly.

I buy enough of each items so I can skip running to the store for 4-6 buying cycles based on shelf life.

We're going to need or want it anyway so it's not going to go bad.

There is a clip board in the prep area so anything that is brought upstairs for use is recorded and replaced on the next shopping trip.

Some items we get delivered by Amazon, they ship for free and if you order regular delivery there is an added discount.

I may be the only guy on the block with 24 tooth brushes and 500 4x4 bandages but I feel better knowing that my family is Good to Go.

 

[JV3]

Thanks for the write up JV3, lots of good lessons learned.

On the topic of siphoning gas from vehicles. With new vehicles, I think you will have a very difficult time siphoning gas through a line or filler tube. Like you had mentioned, most filler tubes have a check valve built into the line. Taping off the fuel filter underneath would not work either, because the gas would need to be run through the fuel pump to get up to that point. You may be able to disconnect the filler neck right at the fuel tank, and snake a hose up in there. But with vehicles being being built smaller and smaller, space for your hands is becoming a premium, and most often requires special tools to reach.

When I was a Auto Tech, we had a little trick to empty gas tanks before replacing fuel pumps. Sometimes the fuel pump was not completely dead, it just didnt have enough fuel pressure to supply the engine. So we hooked up a fuel pressure tester to the port on the fuel rail, jumpered the correct pins for the fuel pump relay, and held the bypass button on the pressure tester, and fuel flowed out of the tube, and into a fuel can.

You dont even need to have an actual fuel pressure tester to get this trick to work. There is a test port on most vehicles, alot of them are right on the fuel rail. Most will have a shrader valve inside(same as a tire stem valve). Just remove this valve(Caution: There still may be fuel pressure, so wear eye protection), and connect a hose over the valve. Then find the fuel pump relay and jumper pins 30 and 87(The pin locations are marked on the underside of the relay. Here are a couple pics I found that show what I am talking about.

You are going to want to use a good sized wire. A paper clip will just heat up and it wont work, too much amperage for that small of a wire. So, just jumper the pins, and the fuel will flow right out of the tube and into your container. Remove the wire to stop the flow. Its not a fast method, but it works. Wouldnt be a bad idea to research your own vehicle and see if it can be done.

I drive a 95 GMC Yukon, and there is no fuel tester port, so I would need to crawl under the vehicles frame rail, and disconnect the line off the fuel filter. This method will work just the same as mentioned above, you are just tapping off a line closer to the tank.

good info...thanks! we have toyota 4runners and landcruiser so it should be simple to research how to do it...i'm stocking up on gas cans in the meantime though.