Greetings and Salutations!
Well, we made it.
Now as a Quick FYI:
This is primarily to discuss my mistakes or holes in my preps, as opposed to the nuts and bolts of other things… how I laid out my gear, where I laid it out… practical stuff that’ll vary person-to-person. I’m also going to go over some societal observations as well. SO here we go…
The storm itself:
T’was a wee bit hairy when the water at 0130 was allll the way up the driveway. That was one thing Sapper and I debated on, was if we needed to go and get the sandbags the County offered up. We decided against it, and almost paid for it when the surge from the Alafia crested to a record setting high.
Said-aforementioned high water mark is approximately seen via the red line on the neighbor’s yard who had evvac’d and hasn’t started cleanup yet:
LOTS of smol branches and limbs down in our A.O….
Turns out the surge was just that, a major surge that Thanks be to God and anyone Else identifying as the Head MF’r in Charge of the Universe, it receeded rather quickly. I went out and caught THIS on film. It’s almost 4 minutes long, and disjoined as I wasn’t trying for anything other than to get a feel and look-see at qwhat was going on. My fon was in a dive-bag, which proved it’s worth again:
Yeah, the wind was bad
At one point I -almost- got blown off my feet… the news said at that time, we were getting hit with 90mph gusts, and I can well believe it.
Now after?
MY yard? While I did the ‘sleep thing’ Sapper handled the daytime cleanup. The delegation was that I could pull night security as my training on it is far more in depth, and my experience is better than his, and he’d handle puppy patrol and yard cleanup.
The Security Situation was for the most part was nominal.
Call it Yellow or a 4 out of 5, with 5 being Green and 1 being Red/Lock and Load, Safeties off.
Not much on the looting of individual houses that I heard of, except for some who lost their generators to nighttime “Genny-Bandits”. Most of this news came via my lil Grundig Survival Radio that was another ‘fell off the truck/out of the connex’ item from Iraq:
It Purely Shocked the Hell out of me how few of my neighbors had a basic battery powered radio! This one is battery (3xAAs) or has the hand crank which works as well. AM/FM/Shortwave 1/2. The morning after while doing the Oh-Dark-Early Battle Damage Assessment, I mentioned how the Ray’s Stadium got wrecked…
They didn’t have a radio, so no one knew about it…
Seeing that I have only one, I’m going to look into getting a few more.
