welcome back haxmaniacs that's right it's that time of year again it's hurricane season the first day of hurricane season arrives and it is expected to be a busy one not almost right on schedule but literally right on schedule with a storm organizing in florida's direction we're about two miles from the atlantic ocean you know as the sea gull flies today i want to share with you how we prepare for a hurricane what we use to get ready and how we get ready to evacuate if necessary the area we live in has not had a direct hit from a hurricane in over 100 years and no real threat in decades until 2016 with hurricane matthew we had mandatory evacuations that year which to be honest with you i don't know why they call them mandatory because they're not now this was our first time dealing with such an event so we thought we'd be really smart and we'd book our hotel room like a week in advance just like everybody else apparently because they were all booked up now i for one hate with a passion staying at a hotel or a motel they just always feel like you're throwing a mattress and a blanket down on the floor of a public restroom now i actually feel the same way about eating in fast food restaurants so you know what can i say they're just disgusting if you never had to evacuate let me paint a picture for you basically what you do is you throw basically everything that means anything to you into the back of your car and then you make a horrible drive to a miserable place and then you sit in that room and then you watch the weather channel exaggerate how terrible things are in your town and then you hope that when you get home your house is still there and that it's still dry now one thing you never hear them talk about on the news is all the thievery now i'm not talking about looting everybody knows about the looting i'm talking about the people that just like all predators in the animal kingdom who seek the vulnerable out they peruse through hotels at night knowing that people from out of town have all other valuables and you know just basically anything important to them in the trunk of their vehicles now we didn't see any of this in the news and i don't know why they don't ever report it on the news but we were definitely hearing about it happening to people around us so i spent basically every night that i was in the hotel room to begin with staring outside the window at the vehicle all night because you know we have the girls baby stuff we had my computers for work um all my mom and dad's stuff and why can't i get this key out of here anyway that is until after a couple nights i decided it was just easier to uh yeah just sit in the truck all night and that way i could monitor everything you'd probably be surprised at uh how many looky-loos drive through the hotels that night quite a bit actually now after a week of that they opened the rows back up and we were able to come home now we were blessed in the sense that uh our home was completely untouched while some of the others very nearby to us were not we that home at the time sat at a whopping i think 16 feet above sea level that was our first evacuation experience but not our last the next one was straight out of a horror movie i'm not even exaggerating i'll tell you more on that in just a second before i go into that let's talk about what you need to have on hand to be ready first things are water and food experts say you need three days water per person and three days food per person now based on those recommendations i don't believe those experts have ever been through an actual emergency or watch the news after one i would have five to seven days of each for an emergency and you better have this stuff on hand before the storm is even announced too because the grocery stores shelves emptied out fast when the world was halfway normal and the new normal for the time being at least means that they may be empty at any given time storm or no storm you need at least one gallon of water per person each day although you know this would be three days for one person so does that really look like that would be enough probably not you can keep water bottles or you could use something like these seven gallon water jugs that you know we have a bunch of these on hand and i keep in the trailer you can even get something that goes in your bathtub i think one brand is called like a water bob and it fills up it's a plastic container that sits in your bathtub and you fill it up from the tap and it holds like something from 70 to 100 gallons of water as a side note if you're like me and you have a deep well don't even think about drinking that water after a flood until it's been tested for contamination oh and the used to be poo water that comes from a city tap is probably currently poo water so don't drink that unless you got the go ahead from the city or county there go vis-a-vis you need to have even more clean water available to drink now if you've got electricity you can always boil that water water purifiers are good to have on hand as well we have this berkey you know which is kind of a requirement if you want to be a homeschooler or a homesteader technically you can't call yourself either if you don't have a berkey there's other type of filtration systems that are simple as well like this one you fill up the bag you drink the water through the straw this one is a life straw same type premise you just dip one end into the nasty water and then you just drink through this and it filters like 99.9 percent of all the bad stuff since we live on the coast i always thought it'd be kind of cool to make a desalinator but you know might be something fun for later freeze-dried food whether made at home or pre-packaged i've already done a video on this is great for emergencies or you can even just buy some surplus mres meals ready to eat food like canned tuna and crackers are great for emergencies while ramen noodles and dried soups are cheap emergency food now those will require water and heat of course canned goods like ravioli are easy and good to have even if they aren't that great to eat because you can't eat them cold you could also just take along some bread and peanut butter ritz crackers with cheese also one thing is keep some energy bars on hand because it's going to be a stressful situation and your blood sugar is probably going to drop so these are good to have on hand but adam how would one heat up one's food without any power well i'm glad you asked something like one of these little compact coleman cooktop grills are really great and easy to store because they pack up really small and to power them all you need are like these one pound propane tanks another cheap easy thing to store i always keep a bunch of these on hand for a variety of things you can also buy five pound tanks or we actually carry what is i think a 40 pound one it's a pretty tall one whenever we go because you know we like to carry something bigger it all depend
