Practical Prepping

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  • Hurricane Season – Water

    You probably already have 30 gallons of fresh drinking water stored in your home. That’s enough for most families for nearly 10 days!

    Most people in the U.S. have a 30 gallon water heater in a utility closet somewhere full of perfectly usable drinking water.

    I found this handy PDF with good instructions on how to access and use that water safely.

    Click to access Get-water-from-water-heater.pdf

    This is a huge advantage, and being able to share this knowledge with neighbors during a crisis is critical. I’d recommend practicing this technique sometime as a method of determining what exactly you will need to buy to extract the water from your tank.

    Most people will need at a minimum 1 garden hose, and 1- 5 gallon bucket for storing the extracted water.

  • Hurricane Preparedness Guide- Part 2

    In my last post (Hurricane Preparedness Guide: What Miami Needs to Know) we showed a process for determining the most likely disaster scenario that you will be presented with based on where you live, and showed how we determined that Miami residents need to focus their prepping efforts on Hurricane Preparedness.

    In this post we begin our discussion of preparing for an actual hurricane. We will start by assuming that we take FEMA’s advice and evacuate (Bug Out), discussing the advantages and disadvantages of bugging out from a hurricane, as well as some of the unique challenges that bugging out presents.

    There is ALWAYS advanced warning of hurricanes in Miami, and following the guidance of FEMA and government organizations is typically sound, and conservative advice.

    So we know there is a hurricane headed for Miami, and we know that we have an evacuation order. What to do now?

    In this post we will assume that we follow the guidance of the government, pack the car and leave.

    • Where will we go?

    The first and potentially the most important decision you need to make is to decide where will you go. You don’t have to make a perfect decision here, but having a few places predetermined, and the cash on hand for the hotel or accommodations needed on your arrival will make your evacuation easier.

    • How long do we need to be prepared to be gone?

    72 hours is a good starting point.

    • What should we bring?

    See The Basics

    • Risks of Bugging Out

    Unfortunately bugging out does not guarantee your safety during the storm. As we saw with Hurricane Helene in 2024, occasionally storms change directions and are extremely destructive even far inland. It’s very important that if you have chosen to bug out you go far enough away and continue to very closely monitor the situation. You have abandoned the safety of a structure and are now living on the road. You need to avoid this storm and any other dangerous affects of the storm.

    Of course eventually you will stop at a hotel or friends house to stay. You need to consider what might happen if the storm changes direction and heads towards you while staying there. During Hurricane Helene we saw hotels kicking people out after 12 hours of lost power, leaving those travelers with nowhere safe to go.

    During Hurricane Helene we also saw people being surrounded by flooding in their vehicles, unaware they had even entered an area experiencing extreme weather. Tune into local radio stations, and utilize your emergency radio to monitor the local NOAA weather bulletins, as these will provide up to date information.

    It’s impossible to always avoid dangerous weather events, but I am confident that as long as you maintain your situational awareness while bugging out and recognize how vulnerable you are while evacuating that you will be able to avoid dangerous situations by playing it safe.

    Make your plan today. It can be as simple as talking about the plan with your family, and making a list of items you would want to bring if you needed to evacuate your home.

  • Hurricane Preparedness Guide: What Miami Needs to Know

    My sister has been asking me more and more lately ‘What do I need to have to be ready for the terrible shit that is coming?’.

    First, we need to start with a plan!

    I’m going to use this question from her as an excuse to walk through the process of analyzing a region for the most likely scenarios you may encounter and how to prepare for them. We will use this process to inform our emergency plans, and finally decide what items we need to buy, or skills we need to practice.

    This process will show you how to think about emergency planning and preparedness in a way that can be repeated and is applicable for any region that you may be reading from.

    She lives in Miami Florida, within the city and as such we will do some analysis on the risks and disasters that she is most vulnerable to while living there.

    FEMA maintains a site where you can look up the ‘risk’ level of a region: https://hazards.fema.gov/nri/map

    The website provides a lot of great information to get you started with your personal emergency planning.

    This is what the FEMA site shows for southeast Florida. It’s dark red with a risk index of VERY HIGH! Let’s break this down a bit more. The FEMA site also allows you to generate a printable report for the selected region, which I did.

    The report shows you multiple tables breaking down their data more. The site appears to be primarily tailored towards helping insurance companies forecast future claims, which is great because it means that this information is based on real data. I found this Risk Factor Breakdown table to be the most useful.

    What I like about this table is that they have ranked the Risk Factors in order by EAL (Estimated Annual Loss), which we can use a proxy for which risks are both highly likely and bring extreme consequences.

    It’s no surprise to me to see Hurricanes at the top of the list, but there are a few surprising events on the list. Wildfire?! Cold Wave?! It’s really hard to imagine a wildfire in the Florida humidity, but I suppose anything’s possible. I think the cold wave makes the list since most homes in Miami do not have any heating capability, so even a relatively moderate drop in temperatures could put a lot of people at risk of ‘freezing’. The FEMA data also includes an index for ‘Social Vulnerability’, and ‘Community Resilience’, both of which Miami scores very poorly on. Miami, do better smh.

    The FEMA website is great for determining regional natural disaster risks, but doesn’t include disasters beyond natural disasters. That’s why you don’t see power outages, civil unrest, nor pandemics on the list.

    Let’s step back for a minute. When my sister asked me what she should buy to prepare for ‘the shit that’s coming’ she wasn’t referring to a hurricane, she of course meant the inevitable long term destruction of the U.S. power grid by a near peer cyber threat, such as China. 😉

    So why am I talking about hurricanes?

    Three reasons:

    1. The chances of a hurricane occurring are very high
    2. Being prepared for a hurricane will help you be prepared for a wide variety of common emergencies, and provides a solid foundation for preparing for other long term disasters
    3. We can talk about preparing for hurricanes without sounding like total lunatics

    In fact, by the end of this series you will see that prepping for most scenarios is nearly the same. What we really need is a prioritized list of items and skills to acquire to prepare for a wide swath of potential disasters.

    In the next post we’ll talk more specifically about how to prepare for Hurricanes, since we have decided that a Hurricane is the number 1 threat to those living in south east Florida.

  • How to configure the BTECH UV-PRO for APRS

    Since I couldn’t find a succinct step by step guide for getting this new radio setup for APRS I figured I would take a swing at it myself.

    1. Create a channel for APRS
      • Use either the iphone or android app to setup a channel for your countries APRS frequency (144. 390MHz for U.S.)
      • This channel shouldn’t use any ctcss tones or any other repeater settings
      • I have been setting channel 30 in each channel group as the APRS channel
    2. Set the Settings from the radio settings menu
      • Menu -> General Settings -> APRS Settings
        • Call Sign: Enter your call sign
        • Path: WIDE1-1, WIDE2-2
      • Digital Mode
        • Enable: Check
        • Share Location: Set a time – I chose 360sec
        • Digital Channel: Choose the channel you configured from step 1
        • Format: APRS (BSS seems to be a proprietary BTECH protocol, which I want to do a deep dive on eventually)

    That should do it! Now just navigate to aprs.fi and wait to make sure your packets are getting picked up somewhere. Luckily I live within a mile of the nearest igate so I quickly started seeing my packets on the map.

    I haven’t received any packets yet on the actual radio, but I have read a few reports online that folks weren’t able to decode packets until they turned their squelch completely off. That would be a real shame if that was required for it to work since that would essentially make the radio single purpose while use APRS. I don’t want to listen to static while walking around.

    Since I wasn’t able to find this answer elsewhere online, it’s worth mentioning that APRS will continue to operate in the background until you turn it off. You can transmit on other channels, listen to FM radio, anything you want. You won’t even hear your packets going out, it will just transmit them without notifying you at all.

  • The Basics

    *** This post contains amazon affiliate links to products I recommend. I will get a commission if you purchase using the links below.

    Solving my water crisis problem was quite simple that day the city water had been cutoff. Since there was no power outage, and all the grocery stores were operating normally, all I needed to do was go to the store and buy some water.

    But what if the power was out? And what if the outage affected a much larger area, so that more people were rushing to the store to buy water? It isn’t hard to imagine the scenario spiraling out of control within even just 1-3 days without city water.

    Luckily, I am an active outdoorsman so I do have water filters for backpacking at home. I could have walked over to the lake near our house and literally filtered water from the lake for drinking. Anyone who has used a filter backpacking before can tell you that filtering water is time consuming and challenging. You need plenty of jugs to store the clean water in, you need a container for scooping up the dirty water, and you need to maintain your filters or else they will clog up and the flow rate will slow down immensely. Filtering enough water while backpacking can take 20-30 minutes easily, and that’s with just enough water for cooking and drinking. At home, needing more water for a small family you could easily be dealing with an hour of time every day just to filter enough water to survive.

    My point is that having more substantial water storage would be MUCH more convenient for practical uses during a short term water outage. While water filtration might make a reasonable long term solution, in the short term you will want to have some water ready and available to use.

    What does a very basic level of preparedness look like? To me it is a 72 hour kit. Enough supplies to survive 72 hours totally off-grid. No city water, no trips to the grocery store, and no electricity.

    ‘Is that for bugging in or bugging out?’ you might be wondering… ‘BOTH’! I’d say.

    At this point, 72 hours of supplies is small enough that it is easy to keep and store at home, and also could easily fit in your vehicle if you needed to evacuate.

    Bug out bags

    Bug in bags

    Get home bags

    EDC

    If you start diving down these rabbit holes like I did you will never get started, and the next time the city water gets cut off for a few hours you will still not have any water of your own to rely upon. Do yourself a favor and keep it simple. This will be a generic 72 hour survival kit for both staying at home (Bugging In), and evacuation’s (Bugging out). This will be the foundation upon which we build this house!

    What all should be in your 72 hour kit?

    • Water
      • 3 gallons per person
      • Buying individual gallons from the grocery store is fine
      • Using larger water jugs can be advantageous
      • I like Scepter water jugs because they are extremely durable, and have a handle on top for easy transport. There are also plenty of accessories such as spouts and filters that will attach directly to them because this is the standard military spec water jug. Buy them here.
    • Food
      • 9 meals per person of shelf stable food
      • Calories are more relevant than servings in calculating this ensure you are planning for at least 2200 calories per person per day
      • Military Style Rations are great because they have built in heater systems, so you will never need to remember to bring pots and pans. Most people wont like the taste as much as some other options.
      • Buy Here
    • Light Source
      • Anything is fine as long as it is charged or has fresh batteries
      • Buy Here
    • Emergency hand crank radio with NOAA Channels
    • Power source (optional)
      • A charged up power bank that you would normally take on a vacation is perfect. Most of these can charge your phone multiple times so that once the 72 hours have ended you can reconnect.
      • Buy Here
    • Fuel in your vehicle (optional)
      • Try to never let your vehicle have less than a half tank of gas again
      • Keep your vehicle maintenance up to date
    • Cash
      • Couple hundred dollars in smaller bills
      • A mix of 1, 5, 10, and 20 dollar bills would be best
    • Important Documents
      • Birth Certificates
      • Social Security Cards
      • Marriage Licenses
      • Insurance documents
      • Inventory of high value items that you own
      • Anything else relevant to you that cannot be replaced
    • Special Considerations
      • Prescription Medications
      • Baby Stuff
      • Stuff for an elderly parent you may be taking care of
      • Anything unique that you absolutely need and that is hard to acquire

    That’s it. If you have all of these items ready and set aside than you are probably more prepared than 90% of the population for an emergency.

    I could keep adding items to this list, feeding your shopping addiction, and obsession but I wont. Why? Because this is honestly probably enough.

    Q: ‘But what if I am bugging out? Won’t I need some clothes to change into?’

    A: ‘Ya maybe, but also maybe not. The chances of not being able to return home within 72 hours is realistically probably pretty small. The chances of you needing some food and water is 100%.’

    My point is this: Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good

    The reality is if you’re bugging out you will MOST LIKELY drive 1-3 hours, use your credit card to book a hotel, and return within the next day or two.