The alarm goes off. It’s 4:30am. Time to go to Home Depot for plywood. If they took your pulse on the drive there, it would be 120. At least it felt like that. When you arrive, there’s already a line stretching out the door.
The manager is going up and down the line telling people they only have plywood and no other supplies. Everyone is mostly calm, to your surprise. Waiting, waiting, waiting. You’ve made it inside the actual store now. More waiting. Shuffling. Moving forward. Lines start getting reorganized and the order and calm you were so surprised to see when you got there are disappearing by the minute. Frenzy infects the mob. Places in line are lost.
People are angry. A position is secured and you’re happy. Phew. Some of your line-neighbors are giving out advice. Some of it is good, some shoddy. Despite the chaos, most of your fellow shufflers are courteous, nice. Aisle by aisle, the final destination draws closer: the plywood stack, in all it’s promising-safety-from-the-storm glory. An employee starts to count people. A bad sign. There are hundreds of people behind you. They’ve been waiting for hours and most of them will leave empty-handed. You’re glad you got here as early as you did. You later hear some people had been waiting outside the store since 2am. They put the plywood on your cart and you make it out! Success. You’re in your house getting things ready and shoveling food in your mouth since you didn’t get a chance to eat breakfast. You’re tired but somehow energized and eager to get the boards up. You go to the hurricane shutter storage room, only to find some of your boards missing. Pieces aren’t there. They’re gone. Has someone taken them? It must be someone in the building. Suddenly, you’re enraged. The hunt for your stolen plywood is afoot, and you won’t relax until you have it back. Not even then, you still have to put them up and try to drive out of here…
Hurricane Lesson #1 People can be horrible. Our friends actually did have their plywood stolen. It was disturbing to watch unfold, especially getting up before the sun and waiting in line for hours to get it in the first place.
They later found out it was taken by another neighbor. Right next door! The person who stole it actually covered up the number on the plywood with spray paint! People can suck. But people can also be really great. Our friends/neighbors helped us out tremendously. They provided guidance on the plywood and help putting them up and taking them down. They sheltered us in their refrigerated paradise when our A/C was out and it was 95 degrees in the apartment. It feels so much safer/it’s more comforting when you’re “in it” with someone else. Adri’s classmates who live nearby came over to check on us to see if we needed anything and let us borrow tools. Another friend checked in to see if we needed anything, and sent us pictures of our place after the storm to show us what kind of damage (or lack thereof) took place. We got to stay with Kelsey in SF and see people when Adri wasn’t studying. Numerous other people checked in with us and offered help. So there are some people who will steal your supplies in times of need, and it’s okay to be aware of that. But don’t assume that’s everyone. This reminds me of a Mr. Rogers quote about children and what to say when they see scary things on the news. He says, “There was something else my mother did that I’ve always remembered. ‘Always look for the helpers,’ she’d tell me. ‘There’s always someone who is trying to help.’ I did look out for helpers, and I came to see that the world is full of doctors and nurses, police and firemen, volunteers, neighbors and friends who are ready to jump in to help when things go wrong.”
Hurricane lesson #2. People can also be really awesome.
After living in Florida for a little more than two years now, these are some of my thoughts on hurricane preparedness. There’s a lot more to preparedness in general but that’s for a later time. We already had a decent cache of survival supplies since I’m into this stuff. Being from California, we’ve got a strong handle on earthquake preparedness. Hurricanes are a different beast. By the time we started paying attention to the hurricane, it seemed like we were three days behind everyone else. Grocery stores started running out of water and non-perishables, Best Buy ran out of external battery packs, and hardware stores were out of plywood and other prep gear. Luckily, we didn’t need to scramble for most of the things people were scrambling for. Here are a few short things I observed/learned.
1. Buy easy things first. Like go do it now, in the off-season. Here are the items I have found to be most important, both from researching and from my personal experience so far. Next time you’re shopping just get extra non-perishable food (make sure you have a can opener) and a couple packages of water bottles. I advocate getting bottled water first and then bigger water storage containers later as you can share the bottled water more easily. Get more items as you can in order of importance and expense. I’d recommend agas can next. Wirecutter has good a recommendation. Some other items that aren’t commonly on some lists but are helpful: contractor black garbage bags (extra thick and perfect for wrapping stuff and storing it in safer places like windowless, center bathrooms), caffeine pills (for staying awake while trying to drive after no sleep from working all day, or some similar situation). General life tip (not only for emergencies): take L-theanine with the caffeine. From the nootropics subreddit: “L-Theanine is one of the main psychoactive compounds found in tea. L-theanine is extremely safe and has been shown to mitigate the negative aspects of caffeine, such as anxiety, increased blood pressure and diminished sleep quality, while possibly improving upon the positive aspects.” Okay, back to emergencies. Have some extension cords (for power tools that don’t have batteries), power tools (especially a drill/impact driver), good work gloves (for moving plywood and other crap around), fans (airing the place out and providing some cooling if the power is back but your A/C is not), Also a pry bar/axe/hatchet-fire extinguisher combo. If you’ve covered the windows and a fire breaks out you may have a tough time escaping. And a fire extinguisher, obviously, for fire suppression along with the tools to try to escape the barriers you’ve created.
2. Backup your stuff. My backup process is to scan or take pictures of items. Put files on an external hard drive. Backup that external drive to another external hard drive. Then I backup up everything to the cloud through Backblaze. That way you have the physical items themselves, the items on hard drive1 that you take with you, the items on hard drive2 that you store somewhere, AND everything is on the cloud. It may seem excessive but it’s easy once you have everything set up and really solid. If it doesn’t seem worth it just imagine your computer or hard drives being destroyed by a fire or flood. Then you won’t be as upset when you accidentally delete something on your computer, or your hard drive crashes, or flooding ruins your mementos.
3. Get to know your neighbors. It makes things easier when you’re all scrambling outside your place or need to borrow things from each other. Easy way to do it: say hi when you see them outside. This is often enough to let them know that you exist and are probably decent enough not to steal their plywood when the storm craze sets in. And you never know, you might make some friends in the process!
4. Don’t put tape on your windows. This is not empirically supported. As an aside, neither is standing under doorframes during earthquakes (pro-tip for West-coasters). Put flammable things away and be especially careful with candles/open flames. You really don’t want a fire to break out when you’ve just spent a bunch of time barricading yourself in.
5. Keep copies of your house keys around. Leaving keys with trusted friends and neighbors allows them to check on your place if you’re still hiding abroad. It’s best not to wait until there’s a hurricane watch to copy your keys. You start running out of time quickly in the days before a hurricane, so you want to reduce the number of errands you have to run and the amount of gas you have to use. Do this the next time you’re near a Home Depot or any place that has a key-copier.
6. Park in a parking garage on an above-ground floor (but not the uncovered top floor), if you can. I don’t think most people’s cars are too damaged by the wind itself, but sheltering the car can limit the chances of flooding and getting hit by flying tree branches and other debris.
7. Keep your gas tank full pretty much always. By the time you hear about the hurricane, there will more-than-likely be a line of 30 cars outside every gas station within reasonable distance. Get a gas can before and keep that full. If you need to evacuate you may be caught in traffic for longer than you think and you don’t want to run out of gas and be stuck on the highway.
