Probably. While your cold weather plans get used for several months out of every year, a hurricane is a comparatively rare event, and the damage can be anywhere between devastation of an area and “Dammit, the backyard is a mess”.
Yeah, I don’t see my mother making one of those.
The kind of people who don’t have the foresight to prepare for a hurricane aren’t typically the resourceful, handy types capable of fashioning a stove out of a soda can and rubbing alcohol.
Yeah, good point. I’ve probably been spoiled by my exile to New England.
Yes, that does seem like a lot of fuel to store for the average homeowner. Unless you go through a lot of fuel anyway (like on a farm), that’s a lot of fuel to keep safely stored and fresh.
We bought 10 cans and filled them with gas on the Friday before Gustav arrived. We figured we’d be without electricity for around a week. We went almost two weeks without it after Katrina. It was also nice to be able to afford it this time around.
We do plan on keeping the cans on hand. Considering how many trees were weakened by the storm and will probably come day with the next strong wind, I can guarantee you we’ll be using them again within this next year.
Not everyone can be Batman, you know.
Ok, but seriously, all she has to do is cut a soda can in half with her kitchen shears, dump some rubbing alcohol in it, rig up some way to suspend a pot over the flame then light the fuel.
She doesn’t have to do all the stove-building stuff. She could be heating soup or making hot tea in a matter of minutes if she has a soda can and some isopropyl. It really is that easy.
I’ll grant you the TV and house lights, but have you lived in southern Louisiana in the depths of summer? Particularly in a house without fully screened windows with no working fans? It didn’t get below 82 degrees in the house even in the middle of the night. And the humidity was outrageous. I was taking antihistamines constantly and still getting vertigo and earaches. (edit - sorry, I see you are a Houston native. I managed without an A/C for a week, then I was getting sick. If I hadn’t been expected to be at work and school like a normal person while I was without power, I probably could have toughed it out. 
)
The weather finally broke on Monday of this week and we’ve been having somewhat normal for this time of year temps.
With regard to storing fuel… I saw folks filling up to ten five-gallon fuel cans prior to the storm. Their rationale was that if the storm didn’t take out our power, they’d use the fuel in their cars. We didn’t get the generator until about a week after the storm had passed, when quite a few gas stations were back online, so it wasn’t a problem to go fill up our three five-gallon containers every other day.
That was our rationale exactly. As to toughing it out, thanks but I’ll never be hot again. I slept outside in our vehicle after Katrina because it was so unbearably hot in the house. I will never go through again, if at all possible.
Kind of a hijack, I guess, but why do you need light to take a shower?
Women use more than a bar of soap and friction. We need to be able to see where the shampoo, conditioner, razor, etc. are. Also, I imagine robby’s mom wants to be able to safely see to get in and out of the tub without slipping and falling.
I’m going to take a guess and say that there’s no windows in their bathroom. Kinda hard to wash up in complete darkness.
Yeah, I meant to make that point, too. Our master bath has no windows, the guest bath was easier to use during daylight hours for sure. 
I grew up in Hawaii, where hurricanes are not uncommon, and I know there’s a flip side: At the first mention of the word “hurricane”, people would rush out and fill up their gas tanks and buy six months’ worth of toilet paper. :rolleyes:
I currently don’t have a emergency preparedness kit, but you can bet your ass the moment a hurricane looked to be headed my way, I’d be stocking up on matches, candles, batteries, perishables, and bottled water.
I don’t live in hurricane country, but we get lots of power outages. Just about everyone on my street has a generator, but when the power went out for 10 days, we were the only ones with gas. There wasn’t an open gas station in 30 miles (never mind that the roads were impassable), and the 3 gallons you have left in your lawnmower tank don’t last long. With our large generator, we used about 5 gallons of gas per 8 hours. Our 35 gallons didn’t last nearly as long as we’d have liked.
I don’t imagine there’s a baby boom 9 months after a hurricane. With the winter storm, it’s kinda nice to snuggle. With summer heat, do people wanna knock boots?
I stll have some of my Y2K shot gun shells.
I bought alot.
Another excellent observation, MILLER.
What the hell?
You can’t do without shaving for a day or two? Cripes, given what’s going on in Texas do you think anyone will notice you haven’t shaved?
I dunno about any other extremely nearsighted people, but I can take a shower in the dark. Since I can’t see without glasses/contact lenses, I have to ‘find’ the soap, shampoo, etc. anyways. I can even shave my legs in the dark. 
No offense to your mom, who may not be that talented, and should be cautious about falling.
Get her a French Press. She would need a way to boil water, but no electricity is needed. You can make coffee and tea in it. Plus, the coffee tastes better than when made from drip.
In my neck of the woods, the natural disasters are rare but will come with NO warning and are potentially catastrophic. We’re prepared to live a week or more with no electricity, no gas, no water, impassible roads, an uninhabitable house, and care for significant but not life threatening injuries (and, if absolutely needed, defend from looters). My husband keeps a small version of this in his car. At my office we’ve got a full pantry and about 60 gallons of fresh water (and 19 people).
I also expect to be alone during most of this hypothetical week, as my husband is a cop and will likely be, er, busy.
I know a lot of people with no earthquake kit whatsoever, and wonder if some of my neighbors will start knocking on my door. When I lived in NJ, during Hurricane Floyd, I got laughed at by my roommates for stocking up on food and buying 5 gallons of water. We got flooded in by the Raritan river and by nightfall I had strangers from two floors up knocking on my door with, “So and so said you had water?”