Living on the Texas Gulf Coast, hurricane season is a big deal around my house. Over the past few days, Hurricane Ida slamming into Louisiana as a power category 4 storm, with winds of 150mph, kind of renewed my sense of urgency in making sure that my house is set up for storms.
Over the summer, I canned up quite a few things (everything from chicken to squash, to jam to cherries) to augment some of my non-perishable supplies. Which, okay, let’s be honest, non-perishable foods are not in fact infinitely non-perishable. They eventually go bad; they just stay good months longer than they would otherwise.
If we are talking tropical storms that juts dump a bunch of rain for a couple of days, I’m fairly well prepared. But, Hurricane Ida was a monster storm. A storm like that would require a whole different level of ready than what my readiness level is now.
The other day, I had a few minutes, and I decided to put together a basic hurricane readiness checklist. This is not an official recommendation. I am not employed by any of the offices of emergency management, nor do I work for any official agencies like the National Weather Service, or the National Hurricane Center (although seriously, I don’t think I would turn down a job at the National Hurricane Center. That would be freakin’ awesome).
Anyway, I decided to share my list with you so that you can check it out and then tweak it to work for you.
Feel free to download this. I put it in pdf format so that you can open it on any device. Again, this is based on my personal needs, but you can change this to fit your situation. For example, I don’t have any small kids in my house. So, if you have small kids, you would want to make sure you had diapers, wipes, bottles, etc..
To all of our neighbors to the east in Louisiana, our hearts and prayers are with you. There are already several organizations around our area that are taking up donations of supplies and equipment to take over there as soon as the roads are open again. We have been there ourselves (through Ike and Harvey most recently). We understand what you are going through and wish you all of the best.
invisiblecompass 