Practical Prepping

Tag: hurricane-helene

  • 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.