The wife and I moved to Katy on the Saturday before Ike hit. Perfect timing and a blessing because I'd gotten my parents and her mom to come stay with us. We only lost power after the second set of storms rolled through on Sunday and that outage lasted only a few hours. It has long been known that plain old telephone systems are now among the last utilities to go in major storms. Because the line can and does provide current to the circuit, the old style, "wired" phones will continue to work so long as the hard line is not compromised. And there is the rub and lesson reaffirmed by Ike: In areas where phone and power lines are hung from a pole, it may not matter whether you've got an old school phone or not.Stupid wrote:1. must have a land line. Cell phones are useless during this period. Still remembered that i argued with my wife that we should go completely without land line in the new century of technology. Man, was I wrong!!! I was RIGHT to get a regular old style phone that does not need battery.
2. need a bigger UPS battery to charge cell phone and blackberry
3. need a radio that requires little battery power and last long time
4. need some multi-vitamin
5. Blackberry is handy to check information but need to be charged.
6. more water and batteries, never thought power outage could last more than a week.
7. having a gun is handy. It never occurred to me that calling 911 would be such a huge problem during/after hurricane. Having two, if you can.
Other lessons include:
1) Learn to use the text messaging feature on your cell phone or PDA. This service usually continues to work even when large portions of a providers network are down or otherwise congested.
2) If practical, keep at least one, fully-charged, extra battery on hand for your cell phone or PDA. (iPhone users are out of luck on this one)
3) If you own a car, buy the automotive/travel charger for you cell phone/PDA as this will provide at least one additional charging option should you lose power in your home.
4) Crank radios are cheap and work without batteries.
5) If you have friends or family living within a mile or two of your location, two-way radios beat cell phones hands down!
6) I won't start next hurrican season with half-dozen jerry cans full of fuel, I'll have a full dozen to provide at least a week worth of fuel for both our trucks
7) A standby generator that runs on natural gas, if you can afford one, is preferred to portable models that run on gasoline.
8) Make sure the wife understands her shopping list should include only non-perishable items (beans, bullets and water) and enough of each to last at least three days
9) Need to keep rope and gags on hand for parents to keep them out of the way sometimes.
10) Still need to work on making myself expendable at the office and making the wife far more self-sufficient and less of a Democrat...It's hard to manage emergencies at the office when you are trying to deal with them at home too.