Preparing for a Winter Weather Emergency

Winter officially arrives December 21, 2019 in the northern hemisphere. It’s time to prepare for a potential winter weather emergency if you haven’t already.

God can protect us from disasters. However, I am confident God wants us to do our part to prepare for potential disasters, too.

If an emergency causes your home to lose electrical power, phone service, and safe tap water, what can you do? What if the emergency also makes your local roads unsafe due to downed power lines and trees?

One key is preparing in advance. Seek to protect water pipes from freezing and take other actions to plan ahead. Your survival may depend on it. One step in this preparation is assembling an emergency kit.

What to Include in Your Emergency Kit

Keeping a supply of essential items on hand is important. Two important things to have are water and food.

Water: I normally keep about seven 24 packs of ½ liter containers of bottled water on hand and replace it about every two years (the recommended shelf life on the bottles). That water could last me three weeks if I use about one gallon per day. I am single and live alone. Add additional quantities if your household contains more than one person.

Do you think you lack adequate space for this? If so, you are probably wrong. Since I fit it in my studio efficiency apartment of less than 300 square feet, I think most others (in the U.S. at least) can, too.

Food: Unless you have alternative means to cook food (and wash utensils) when your electrical power and natural gas and water are off, I urge you to stock only prepared food and disposable eating utensils for emergencies. This means foods like canned vegetables, canned and dried fruits, nuts, dry cereals that are ready to eat, crackers, etc. Keep a manual can opener on hand for use when electrical power is unavailable, too.

Other items to include in your survival kits: Also include flashlights, a battery-powered radio, batteries, a First Aid kit, any medications you need, and suitable clothing. For a more complete list, I recommend consulting a webpage on the U.S. government website, Ready.gov which provides a list of items for an emergency kit. Their list provides excellent advice as a starting point on what to include in an emergency kit. But you may desire additional items not on their list for your personal situation.

The Ready.gov website also provides much other information about coping with winter weather emergencies, as well as other emergencies.

Keep at Least a Three Week Supply of Essentials

Ready.gov recommends keeping at least a three days’ supply of water, food, and other items. However, I recommend a three week supply (or more) of food, water, medicine, and all the other essentials mentioned on the government websites that apply to your particular situation.

Why so much? If a major disaster occurs, it may take a few weeks for help to arrive. Even after a winter storm hits in a city in the United States, it frequently takes a week or more to restore electrical power to everyone. For example, in Lexington, Kentucky where I live, a February 2003 ice storm left about 2/3 of the city without electrical power, many for days, some for over a week, a few for a couple of weeks or longer.

Furthermore, in response to that 2003 Lexington winter storm, numerous utility-line repair people from states far away from Kentucky assisted, because their states were not affected. Also, the homes, stores, and other businesses in about 1/3 of Lexington were affected little. What if the outages had been more widespread?

If a major winter storm, earthquake, flood, or other disaster knocked out electrical power to much of the United States, there are not enough electrical line repair people to repair all those downed lines in a few days—or even a few weeks (or several weeks) in a very severe case. Depending on the type of disaster, roads may be damaged or flooded, trees may be down, hazardous chemicals may be released in the area, and all utilities (water, electricity, natural gas, phone service, etc.) may be cut off. Please prepare to shelter in your home for at least three weeks in case of an emergency. Board up windows if extremely high winds are expected.

If you haven’t read the list on Ready.gov, I urge you to do so. Even if you’ve read that list or a similar one before, do you remember it, and do you have it stocked? Most of the items on the list are good for a wide variety of emergencies, not just relatively common ones like a winter storm, flood, hurricane, or earthquake.

Carbon Monoxide Detectors and Generators

Buy a battery-powered carbon monoxide detector. Several have died from carbon monoxide poisoning due to improper use of heating sources (generators, charcoal grills, kerosene heaters, gas heaters, etc.)

Remember, diesel-powered and gas-powered generators (as well as charcoal grills) must operate outside your residence. If you have a generator and fuel for it, please place it outside and ventilate it away from all dwellings. The American Red Cross website is one of many sources providing more details on safely using generators.

Please don’t underestimate the danger of generators. Here in Lexington, Kentucky radio station WVLK reported some years ago about one family that was smart enough to put their generator outside and vent it away from their home—but they vented it toward a neighbor’s house. Fortunately, the neighbors felt ill effects and got medical attention. They lived.  But a spokesperson for the Lexington Fire Department stated that the carbon monoxide level in the neighbor’s home was several times the fatal limit, according to the WVLK news report.

Alternative Heating Source and Alternative Communication Methods

Try to have an alternative heating source that requires neither electricity nor natural gas, especially if you live in an isolated, rural area where a shelter is not available in case of a winter emergency. A wood stove, coal stove, oil stove, kerosene heater, fireplace, etc., can work.

Automobile exhaust is one major source of carbon monoxide, so please do not leave your car running in a garage or other enclosed area either.

Do seek to stay warm in cold weather though. If all else fails, putting everyone in one small room that is isolated from other areas and lighting a couple of oil lamps and candles will generate some heat. But, please be careful with fire. Provide at least a little ventilation to avoid either carbon monoxide poisoning or lack of oxygen due to the oil lamps and candles. And take steps to prevent a fire hazard. Standard safety procedures—but does anyone always follow all safety procedures? If we did, many accidents would be prevented. Bundle up in several layers of clothing to hold in warmth, too. Use blankets, sleeping bags, etc.

Try to plan in advance for some way to communicate with others without using a land-line phone, a cell phone, the Internet, a car, etc. Perhaps a satellite phone will be available nearby in an emergency center. An amateur radio operator may also be nearby. But even if such resources exist, you must be able to contact them. Downed power lines, felled trees, flooded streams, chemical fumes, and newly opened holes in the earth (in the case of an earthquake) may all impede your movement. The types of problems depend on the specific disaster.

Evacuation Plans

In addition, be prepared to evacuate your home if necessary. Keep the most essential items of your emergency supply kit handy in backpacks, the trunk of your car, or ready to put on your bicycle rack with short notice. Include appropriate clothing.

A three day supply (or less) of needed items may be all you can manage under these circumstances, especially if you must walk carrying the load.

If authorities urge you to evacuate due to weather or some other disaster, be ready and willing to do so when necessary. Keep your emergency kit packed and ready to go. If you wait, you may face enormous traffic jams and gas stations out of fuel—as New Orleans residents did with Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Your evacuation plans need to consider various transportation methods. If airports, trains, and roads are so damaged (or overcrowded) that you can’t use them to evacuate, you may need to carry your emergency kit a long distance on a bicycle rack while bicycling—or in a backpack while walking.

Be willing to bicycle or walk if necessary, as long as your physical condition allows it. If those who are physically fit leave on their own, it will free up emergency response personnel and equipment for the truly needy, such as the elderly and disabled living alone.

I own a bicycle with a metal rack on the back and a few backpacks. I keep two backpacks stocked with emergency supplies that I try to replace if necessary (due to food close to the expiration date, etc.) once or twice a year. I hope I never encounter a major disaster, but if I ever do these resources may be very useful.

Conclusion

I hope what I’ve written helps you prepare for an emergency if you face one. Please consider doing further research on this topic, too. For example, additional advance planning may be especially necessary for disasters like chemical spills and biological disasters that may require you to seal yourself in an airtight room for a period. Obviously, due to the limited air supply, this would hopefully only be for a few hours.

You can access lots of helpful emergency preparedness resources online, in bookstores, at the library, via phone, etc.,—if you plan in advance. In fact, the Ready.gov and FEMA websites contain a wealth of disaster preparedness information.

If you haven't already done so, please take action now or soon to prepare for possible disasters. Please do plan ahead! And help others plan ahead, too. Please urge others to take the steps advocated in this article, too.

NOTES: This article being submitted to Google Blogger on December 16, 2019 is virtually identical to one the author submitted to Craft News Report (a website operated by his friend Paul Craft) on December 14, 2019. That article was adapted from a chapter in a book the author wrote.