Emergency Prep lessons from Hurricane Sandy

A couple of weeks ago, my mom forwarded me an email with a list of things that one man learned from Hurricane Sandy. It was clear that he was one affected by the hurricane and was without power for over a week. The forward was entitled: "Things that I learned from Hurricane Sandy, by Frantz Ostmann, 11-17-12."

As I read through the email, I made note of a few items that I thought were most helpful. So here's my little list:

1. "If you do not have water stored up you are in trouble. A couple of cases of bottled water is NOT water storage." Remember, you should have stored AT LEAST 1 gallon of water per person, per day for at least two weeks. If you want to store bottled water, a 24 pack of .5 liter bottle is a little over 3 gallons so you need 4 cases of water per person. Click HERE to read my post on water.

2. "Should have as much fuel as water. Propane, gas, kerosene, firewood, fire starter (kindling, pater, etc)." This is definitely got me thinking. One of my goals for the new year is to get an extra tank of propane for our grill so that we always have a full one. I need to learn more about storing gas because that just sounds scary to me. And I don't have a wood burning stove so I am not going to hoard firewood, but I do need to look into some information on fire safety and fire starters in case we lost power in the winter.

3. "Cash is king (all the money in your savings means nothing." In September, I wrote a post called Financial Emergency Fund which gives more information, but it's pretty basic. If everyone is power is out you can't get money out of the ATM or the bank. Cash will be crucial if you need something like gas, food or medicine.

4. "All the food storage in the world means nothing if your kids won't eat it." This is a really great point that I should talk about more. It is super important to have healthy foods with long shelf-lives (like rice and wheat) in your food storage, but you really need to store what you eat. If your kids REALLY like raviolis, buy 12 and stash them somewhere. Then if you end up home for a week without power, you can have happy kids for at least one meal out of the day.

5. "You can never have enough matches." This is a good point that we may not think about. I probably only have a pack or two.

6. "Small solar charging gadgets will keep you in touch. Most work pretty well it seems." This is another thing I have wanted for a while. They are priced from $20 to over $100. This is another thing that I need to do some research on, because if the power is out but the cell towers are still working, I want to be able to use my cell phone.

Hope these ideas give you something to think about. Maybe you can add one to your New Year's Resolutions. Just remember, don't give up because you feel overwhelmed. Just try to do one thing at a time.