Guidelines for emergency supplies

I know I know, you are hearing all this about water for three days...

So here are the minimum requirements for what you need to ride this.. .having more is not a bad idea

Water:

1 gallon per day per person... Personally I recommend three gallons, so you can do some cooking and some basic toweling down but that is the minimum. It is for you to do some basic hygiene (brushing teeth, washing hands, and drinking) This is the BARE MINIMUM, a gallon a day per person.

Canned food that can be eaten WITHOUT heating for three days.... MREs work well as well... for that you should think of one box per person per day... they are that calorie dense. Also tuna in the pouches is great for this. It goes without saying a manual can opener, a swiss army knife works great in these things.

Flashlights... (Preferred you get the wind up ones, otherwise get quite a bit of batteries too)

Radio... see about flashlights. Oh and add a charger for the cell...

This is the minimum.

You also need sturdy shoes, sturdy work gloves...

A barbecue with ENOUGH FUEL will be a good idea, a gas one that connects to your wall... well you may lose gas lines.

Cell Phones... realize during the emergency they may not connect or connect to people outside the affected area... so have call plans.

Getting them windows shuttered is not a bad idea, actually should be done...

And while the storm is going on... and inside room or shelter... stay away from windows, even if they are shuttered.

Oh and turn to your local nooz...

In the tornados we had in Tenn. in April I was surprised by how much we used our cell phones to get internet access to see where the storms were through the weather radar, and how much we used stuff like facebook to spread information that day. Charge up those phones. I used our laptop battery to recharge the phones through usb because power was off a few days. I wish that I'd had a "hand crank" radio.

Candles and batteries and flashlights and lamps.

Gas up your car.

A chain saw and a bbq grill.

Put your mattresses in a center room and sleep on those.

Listen. I don't want to be melodramatic here. But in April we had storms all day. I had put the kids' mattresses in a center room. That night when they fell asleep I put them down there. About 10pm was when the tree came through our house. It was my son's room, it tore out the wall, went all the way to the floor. It would have killed him if he'd been asleep in his bed. Go to the center room, hall, stairwell, closet, whatever it is you got during the storm.

Hang tough folks and be kind to your neighbors.

I realize some folks have no experience on this...

:-)

And good you made it well out of that one.

In our immediate neighborhood most of us with kids left, and came home to trees down and a lot of roof work to be done. One larger house on our street had a portion of their roof come off over one of the kids' bedrooms. We were pretty fortunate and only had a few minor issues with spots in our fence, some roof leaks, and we did lose our gate (it needed to be replaced anyway, the storm just hastened it). In the scheme of things that's pretty good.

This is basically a 12 volt lead-acid battery in a carry case that lets you use it to jump start a car. They're good for that, but even better, most of them have a 12 volt electrical socket that lets you run things off of them. One of those will typically provide around 200 watt-hours of electricity. Combined with a 12 volt to USB adapter and the right cable, that's enough to fully recharge an average cell phone 20 times or so.