What on earth is wrong with sun tea! 
Living without electricity for a few days is just a bit uncomfortable and inconvenient. She has food and water, which are the real necessities.
We don’t have space in our house (and no yard) for a generator, but we always have a BBQ, with charcoal, and a small portable stove with pressurized gas cylinders for cooking, some food, water, candles, flashlights and what not.
I’ve always sort of expected the Big One (earthquake, not Godzilla) to hit us someday.
A friend of mine back in inland Northern Spain works setting up kitchens and bathrooms. He says that, even though white goods stores keep trying to push vitros, he keeps being surprised at how many people want a “double top”: some fires gas, some electric (induction, vitro or resistance). He’s bothered run the stats a few times just out of curiosity and it’s more than half his customers. The reasoning is always the same: so long as one of the two utilities works, I can cook.
And this is in an area which doesn’t get hurricanes, doesn’t get tornados, doesn’t get big quakes (does get lots of tiny ones), riversides get flooded once a year and not every year…
I’m in Louisiana - I was referring to after Gustav. I was wearing as little as possible. I was naked inside the house and wearing a sarong or sports bra/shorts combo outside the house. Suddenly not shaving after having been shaving my armpits and legs is ITCHY.
When you are living in your home with no electricity, you sort of grasp at whatever you can to make yourself feel more normal and human.
And I’m not talking about a day or two. I was without power for two weeks, as I’m expecting a lot of Houston might be.
I’d heard that, even in normal circumstances, bacteria can grow in sun tea. Gosh, Snopes agrees!
In Houston, we were instructed to boil water after the storm; there was some question about contamination. Most of the city water is OK now–but areas closer to the Gulf are still in trouble.
Yet another reason to have a gas stove. Even without electricity, you can cook. Or even just boil water. (I know this doesn’t apply to earthquake country.)
The moment a hurricane looks to be headed your way, all that stuff will disappear from the stores. Why not lay in a supply of non-perishables now?
These people piss me off to no end. They’re the ones the day after a storm hits (that has been predicted for a week) lined up looking for free food, water and ice. There is no excuse for it whatsoever. I understand being working poor, but this goes on year after year. If you are going to be a resident of a storm prone area, you must at the very least have a camp stove, fuel, water and some food for the storm season. It isn’t the governments job, your neighbor’s job or anyone elses responsibility to ensure this is done, it’s YOUR job. Do it or move somewhere that doesn’t carry the likelihood of losing electricity and water for weeks at a time. People who are unprepared make a lot more work for the people who are trying to get things back on track. Except for food, my entire hurricane kit fits in a large tote. It’s not like you need a room of your house dedicated to this, you just need to make sure it’s done.
I can’t help but keep flashing back to Juan. I know that one story that was in the news was that welfare checks had just gone out, so people had just stocked up on a months worth of food. That resulted in a lot of spoiled food for people who couldn’t afford to replace it when the power went out. This in an area that usually doesn’t see hurricanes, so backup generators weren’t exactly standard (although the kitchen managed to provide pretty decent food for not having power). Still, I can’t help but wonder that if people are buying a months worth of bulk food at a time, where are they going to find money for a generator, gas, and extra supplies on top of that?
Granted, I may be biased since I’m from an area where the standard hurricane preparation is to bring in the patio furniture, but I have a hard time feeling angry at people for not being ready for something that doesn’t happen all that often.
That’s what I understand, BoBettie. If it happens rarely, I can understand being unprepared, but every year? A couple of times a year? Learn from your mistakes - do it better next time.
Baton Rouge went at least a decade and a half without anything like this coming through. We had Andrew in 1992 then nothing of any significance again until Katrina in 2005. That’s 13 years without a major storm wreaking havoc in our metro area.
I grew up here (b. 1967) and do not recall anything in the 1970’s or 1980’s. This is the cycle of the 1950’s and 1960’s coming back around. If someone is not from here, which is a lot of our poplulation, they would have no reason to necessarily stock-up. It’s not something that was routine until just very recently.
I agree with you in theory, but I’ve learned since Katrina that a lot of people are so distracted by the pain of their daily lives that they simply cannot plan like that. Or they don’t have the mental capacity to plan like that. Or sure, some are just lazy or short-sighted or whatever. Maybe they didn’t think this one was going to be the big one, whatever.
However frustrating it may be, I’m not ok with standing by and allowing people to suffer because they made stupid choices. The problem is that it isn’t just the stupid people who suffer for their choices… it’s their kids, and their elderly, and their pets, and so on and on. You can’t change their entire outlook on life, or suddenly make them smart, but you have to throw them a rope, don’t you? Maybe next time, they’ll have a better hurricane kit.
(Disclaimer - I lined up for free ice a few days after the storm… not because I couldn’t pay for it, but because I couldn’t find any to buy! And I did take the water and MREs as well, it was kind of a package. Thanks, FEMA.)
Look, I’m forty years old. I grew up in New Orleans and have lived in Baton Rouge my entire life. This is the only time I’ve ever been without electric service for thirteen days straight. Even after Katrina in Baton Rouge, we got power back within 48 hours. I can certainly see people who have much larger concerns to deal with on a daily basis not worrying about a storm that they expect is probably going to inconvenience them for a day or three at the most… especially here in Baton Rouge, which is inland and really hasn’t seen anything like Gustav since Hurricane Betsy in the 60s.
Generally, you can eat what you have on hand in your refrigerator and freezer until the power comes back on. That didn’t happen so much this time, at least not for us in south Louisiana, and surely not for the folks in Texas and southwest Louisiana with Ike.
Sometimes not having enough money takes all your mental energy day after day that I imagine trying to figure out how to scrape together an extra $5 per paycheck to squirrel away to furnish a hurricane kit you might need sometime in the future against the toilet paper your house needs now is just too much to deal with.
You’re right, though. Those who are unprepared make more work for the rescuers and the clean-up crews. At least in my immediate neighborhood, people were going around checking on everyone, making sure the neighbors had supplies and sharing them out, getting ice or fuel for neighbors if you were going out, watching folks’s houses if they were staying with relatives, etc. I hope people are doing that in other communities as well. When the shit hits the fan, your neighbors are there first, not the cops, not FEMA.
I’m not in Hawaii so there’s less urgency to do so, but mostly it’s just easy to put off doing. I tell myself I have no space to store water and that much non-perishable food, that I’ll do it once we get a car, I’m no longer on a little island, and I’m closer to more stores, etc. Back home, the major hurricanes were a decade apart, and the last big earthquake here was almost 15 years ago, so you think you have time. You shouldn’t look at it that way, but it’s easy to.
And yeah, I meant to say non-perishables in my first post.