All right, welcome to season five of Inside Mine Can You Edge. This is a Canadian podcast that's all about the integration of leading an incredible awesome life, individual responsibility, individual emergency preparedness, and how do we navigate life's incredible, wild disruptions that we see among a sit-back, grab a beverage, and enjoy the episodes. All right, welcome back to Auto Studios Inside Mine Can You Edge. We want to talk about hurricanes.
Couple of friends dropped by if you own any incontinence, significant damage, loss of life, and extended misery for a whole host of millions of folks. So what is a hurricane? Why do I care? What does this matter?
And most importantly, what should I as a human being living in a location that could get smacked by a hurricane supposed to do? Sit back, grab a beverage. That's what we're going to talk about. All right, welcome back.
Listen, I mentioned in a previous episode, but I'm a blue noseer. I grew up in Nova Scotia. I spent the vast majority of my early years there before I joined the Army and went to chase the world. And so, no, I've lived in a place that's got hit by a hurricane.
No, I never experienced one myself. They always happen when I wasn't there, but I spent many days in the immediate response unit sitting in an infantry battalion waiting to go rescue those who are in the middle of a hurricane. So, today, what I wanted to talk about is mostly hurricane Fiona and hurricane Ian. Now, there's been so many more names that we could go on and on, but the end result is this.
They hurt, they cause extensive damage, and they're exceptionally disruptive to you and everybody around you or those people you love. So, what are you, what are the measures you can do to ensure that you are as best prepared as possible for coming hurricane? Now, number one, the choice is you. You've chosen to live in hurricanes, which is perfectly fine.
I love the use of both the US and Canada. I think it's wonderful the Caribbean is a great place to be. And I wouldn't change it because hurricanes exist, right? Preparing is up to you.
Okay, the government can put out all the information they want. It's suspect at best and mediocre in the most probable sense. So, preparation is going to be up to you. Now, we know people who have had previous disaster experience and have had significant impacts in their lives are likely to be more prepared for a hurricane up to a period of about three years.
And about three years research tells us that that preparation levels off and starts to wane. So, by six or seven years post-event, the individual is no longer actively or passively even considering preparations for a hurricane. So, that kind of experience does wane. So, today what we want to talk about is the realistic, actual, actionable things that you can do because a hurricane is coming your way.
Number one is you have to plan. This is an active thing, folks. You've got to sit back, grab your favorite beverages. I like to say, grab your writing instrument.
Y'all know for me that is a blue, basic, big pen and a hillroy scribbler. But it can be a white border anytime you want. You should be physically putting this down. You know this sucker is coming and you know it may hit you.
Now we know hurricane tracks are not the easiest thing to predict in well in advance. But anyhow, if you take the 30 minutes it takes to mentally sit down and prepare and set yourself up for success for the hurricane and it doesn't hit, well you just went through a 30 minute planning exercise. That was a great exercise in of itself. If it does come roaring up your driveway, then you are ready to deal with Fiona Ian or whomever they label the next one.
So, the first thing is, is you got to think about your blanket of preparedness. Now I keep returning to this because it's a simple four quadrant system. Number one, your physical health, you have to make sure, and we always look at this that you're as healthy as you possibly can. Your mental health makes sure that you've squared away your anxiety as much as you can.
We've got more episodes on that coming up. So, I won't be mowing that. This episode is more about your other two quadrants. And there can be substantially affected by a hurricane.
The first one is your financial independence, right? You are on a plan, however you've designed, designed that plan to become more financially independent, however you've defined that, right? You could be the author of Rich Dad Poor Dad and try to get in as much freakin' debt as you can and leverage that for an incredible life. Or you could be Mr.
Wonderful and never have an ounce of debt. I'm not going to sit here and tell you which one is better. But your financial independence generally requires you to have employment. Now, the vast majority of people are going to have an employment with somebody else.
You are a salary employee of some type. You're an hourly worker, a monthly or weekly salary. You are paid by somebody. They're probably pretty local to where you live.
They're going to get impacted by the hurricane as well. Your first thing that you need to be doing is figuring out what your employer intends to do with the hurricane. If your plan is to expect your paycheck to continue irrespective of the damage that may result, you may have a very unfortunate realization coming your way. If you work in a factory, for example, if you're on an assembly line and a hurricane comes through and smokes that assembly line, it's probably if they decide to rebuild.
It's probably going to be four to six months that you're not going to have an income because most employers are not going to pay you just because they feel bad for you because your job's no longer available. If your job is at a fast food joint, if your job is in the direct service industry, sit down and walk yourself through the scenario of what happens if where I work or who my work for is damaged by this hurricane. What is their intent? Now, you can create your own plan to deal with what might look like as a shortfall in income.
But your most important step is to get clear, unequivocal direction from your employer as to exactly what they intend to do with your paycheck if you can't come to work. And another thing that this happened, a great deal in Hurricane Katrina. I mentioned Katrina and Andrew because they're probably the two most studied hurricanes in American history. What happens if your job is fine, but your house is destroyed and you're forced to relocate to an alternate location that does not allow you to commute or that commute is exceptionally difficult and along on that's another possibility.
So you have to zero in on exactly what you think may happen to your finances and then come up with a plan. Now, if you're further along on your preparedness journey or you've been a financial guru and you have a slash fund emergency fund, good to go. But if you're like the 90% of people in the world today fighting incredible inflation in Canada, we call it just inflation, you have very low money sitting in the bank probably. You have very little month left when when the paycheck runs out, you're probably run out of the paycheck before you run out of the month.
The point is that most people probably don't have this one. So you're going to have to figure out how to pivot and how are you going to earn money. If your job goes down for four months, you're not going to go to the business next door to try to get higher there because that job is probably going to go down. So think about it, walk yourself through that.
It's going to look different for everybody. How is this hurricane going to hit your business and then therefore going to hit your finances? So with that out of way, another thing that often occurs with hurricanes is evacuations. Now, this is a different hurricane.
If you own a hit my home province of no scotia and the Canadian Maritimes, people don't evacuate hurricanes. They just hunker down, ride it out. A couple of people unfortunately lost their lives because their homes that they were in got swept into the water. But for the most part, yeah, we don't do that evacuation thing.
We just kind of hunker down and we take it upside the chin and then we come outside to see what happens. So Americans are different because let's just say the hurricanes that hit them are a much bigger, higher category, much lower millibar, massive, incredible storms that if they did hit the Canadian Maritimes, they would evacuate. So evacuation is a deliberate action. We call that in the military is a deliberate event, which means it's something that you, listen to me clearly, that you plan out, right?
It's not up to the government to provide you a destination to land to in an evacuation. Okay, that's, you know, piss poor planning, PPP as we like to call it. Your responsibility for evacuation, and this happens for any and all events, you should have an evacuation plan. You need to know where you're going and have that prearranged.
No, it's not a credit card at a hotel. It is a friend's place. It is an alternate place to go. It is a relative.
Okay, if you don't know anybody in the United States of America or Canada, that's a different sense. But odds are you have some family that are of a significant far away distance that you will be able to land. And now it's also going to incur that if you do get a direct swipe upside the head from a hurricane, you're probably going to be displaced for a significant period of time. Like folks that lost their home in wildfire in, in Fort McMurray, Northern Alberta, some of them were over a year outside or home or more.
Where are you going to spend that, right? So what you're going to do is you're going to find a place that somebody's couch you can land on for a reasonable period of time, a couple of weeks. And you're going to do that because you've got family, you've got friends, you've built a social network, as we talk about all this, you need to know your destination and have it prearranged, right? And I say this all the time, mine is simple.
I've got a friend that lives about 150 kilometers from here. It's about 100 miles. His house and my house are reciprocal agreements for each other's family. You can show up at my front door, unannounced.
Here you are. Good to go. We've got it. So we're far enough apart, the threat profile, the risk management threat profile we face here in Ottawa, it's not going to affect his location and mine.
So because of that, I have a pre-established agreement on a place where my family can land for an extended period of time. No questions asked. We do this for each other. It's just a friendly agreement with a friend.
You've got it to go. Understanding it may have to be semi-permanent if you have job. Remember, a hurricane can hit and damage a lot of homes, but it doesn't damage everybody's home. So the probability will be different depending on where you live.
But the whole point of evacuation is, and all the experts in the field and feeble will even tell you this. When they put a voluntary evacuation out, that's the time to go. If you're waiting to the mandatory evacuation, you're going to get onto the clogged roads. So when FEMA says we got a hurricane coming, we're putting, or the local state version of FEMA, puts out a reasonable evacuation notice saying, hey, listen, we highly recommend people in here.
This is a voluntary evacuation. That's the time to get everything that you want in your car because you're not in a hurry to take the things that matter and the things that you can live that you can't live without. Get them in your car, your supplies, and take yourself to the alternate location. Sometimes one family member would have to return to the house to carry on normal employment because they're an hourly or salary worker.
That's fine. You take a day off to make the transition to get your family where they need to be, and then whoever the wage earner is, we'll go back and carry on work. But the point is evacuate when they weren't voluntarily, not when it's mandatory. Unless you're somebody who's a great libertarian, and you're like, I'm not leaving, just make sure you're prepared to hunker down.
But the point being with evacuation, you need to have that plan well in advance. It's up to you. Do not wait for the government to tell you what route to take and the destination to go to. But the biggest thing that you have to do is say, imagine you're at your home, say, for whatever reason hurricane come through your house is damaged, powers down, blah, blah, blah.
What does your world look like for the first little bit? And I put a tweet out before Hurricane FEMA hit Halifax, or sorry, hit Nova Scotia, my home province, and I basically gave some advice. Listen, you have to get, you have to deal with events on the theory of disaster impact reduction, right? And that says, you're going to lose access to critical infrastructure, full stop.
What's your plan? You don't care if it's a hurricane or a tornado, they took out the power lines, you're out of power. So think about it from an impact reduction scenario. Number one, you're going to lose hydro and you're probably going to lose it for one, two, maybe three weeks.
What does your world look like at your house with no power for three weeks, right? So you have to think yourself through that. That has a cascading effect to a lot of things. Number one, how are you going to generate power, right?
I call it your minimum power profile and a more in-depth study that we've done here inside my new head on previous episodes about hydro is building your minimum power profile. One of the things that you absolutely need to keep charged, even in the event of a hurricane. So for me, that is a small freezer that contains my frozen food, because I can take a nice block out of that and put it in my fridge to keep my fridge going. And it is to make sure that I can charge my cell phone because that is communication and my satellite communication device, which is just an in-reach mini.
I use that in major events because what that allows me to do, because if the cell towers go down, which they have in a lot of places in hurricane, in the Maritimes, and they probably will as well, you can't call 911. I mean, if you did, there's nobody to come help you. So probably for the first three days, they will be 0 911 service. It doesn't matter what's happening to you.
It doesn't matter who's having a heart attack. It doesn't matter the security threat that you have. It doesn't matter the house fire that you have. Nobody's coming to help.
So understanding that 911 will not be a service that you'll have access to allows you the planning process for that type of thing. So that leads me to believe, you know, I went to Costco and got a fire extinguisher. No, I can't put a house fire out with it, but if something starts, I've got a way to put it out because I know the fire department is not going to be available. I have taken a first aid course and I have a reasonable first aid kit.
No, I don't have an invasive trauma kit. I'm not over the top on that. But I have first aid. I know that people around me break bones.
There's not going to be a place in the hospital to take them to. There's not going to be an EMS to show up to pick them up. And likely, the local roads are going to be impassable anyhow due to knockdowns or trees. So trying to put something with a broken leg in a car, if the car wasn't crushed or overturned, to try to get it to a hospital is probably not the best idea in the very initial days.
So how do I deal with a broken leg? How do I deal with a smashed hand? How do I deal with a significant bleed? I need to know how to do that and I have to have the tools to do that.
More simply on a communication perspective, yeah, that garment in reach to me too. And I know it's a very expensive thing, but I have it for all my backcountry ventures. When I turn it on and turn the plan on, which I do before that smacking of a major storm, it allows me to use satellites to communicate. So anybody who's a pre-contact on my phone, I can communicate them via satellite in 160 or 160 character texts, right?
So there's no pictures, there's no phone calls, but there is two way communication with anybody on the face of this earth from my smartphone is Bluetooth to my garment in reach, meaning it takes a long time to drain the power on that. Plus I get weather forecasts. So basically I remain in communication with a member I want to remain in communication with without access to cell towers and without access to the internet because that sucker will be gone as well. So understanding that last couple of things you need to consider food, right?
Now I talked about how I keep a small freezer going with an alternate power supply. I use a daiquiri 504 solar panel, you can have a generator of some type, you can share a friend's generator. I mean, you literally need to keep a freezer running for three hours every 24-hour period to ensure that it stays frozen. So if you take three hours to divide into 24, that means eight people can share a generator if your intent is to keep freezers going, right?
So not everybody has to have a generator. This is about building community social capital, sharing resources, that type of thing, right? So if you've got your food preserver, if that's not an issue for you, you have to answer the question, how are you going to cook for the two or three weeks before your power comes back on, right? How are you going to cook?
Lots of ways to do that. Figure it out. How are you going to make meals, right? How are you going to boil water for coffee and tea?
I don't have my coffee. I'm ugly. My wife doesn't have her tea. She's ugly, right?
So let's make sure that you can do that. Make sure that you can cook food because you're also going to have to warm up water because you're going to want take bird bass standing outside or standing in the bathroom. You're going to need the ability to create warm water. But first, you've got to be able to purify water, right?
There's lots of water around when a hurricane hits, both from the sky and flooding all over everything. But that water's not possible, right? The water is just not possible. And you can't be certain that the water coming out of your tap will be possible after the event.
So how do you intend to purify it? Now, pure water purification tablets are simple, cheap, and easy way to do it, understanding how to use bleach. And I'm not even going to tell you ratios because I'm not going to be responsible for you poisoning yourself, do the research, right? If you're really rich, you can go get yourself a burky water filter, which is wonderful.
But if you're like me, you just have a, sort your squeeze or a grail cup or something like that from camping equipment or just basic chloride dioxide tablets, sorry, from your basic water purification stuff. And they're cheap off the internet. But you have a plan to purify water because think about it, you're going to have to provide food, water, and shelter to yourself without access to any critical infrastructure, right? And I'll go back to a good friend of mine from Sanh BC, or sorry, Sydney BC, who lives in an earthquake zone and knows it's more than likely that his house is going to be damaged or may come down because it's a much older house than it wasn't built, the hurricane or sorry, the earthquake codes.
He keeps all his emergency supplies in the garage, which is next door. Even if that comes down as far as material is removed to get access to it, plus he has a very robust shelter system so that he's perfectly fine camping in his front yard toilet system. He's got everything that he doesn't have to go anywhere when the major earthquake happens. He'll be able to carry on surviving and living and taking care of normal household operations on his tiny little property.
And I've been there, fantastic individual, fantastic resource. He's been on this podcast years and years ago, but hopefully I'll be able to train to come back again to talk about some other stuff. But the point being is that the whole wrap around a hurricane is it's going to come but you will have notice. You have time to plan.
It's not like an earthquake. You'll have time to go through this deliberate planning process, sit down with your paper and go through number one, understanding your finances. How is this going to impact your ability to earn a living? And if your ability to earn a living comes to an abrupt halt, exactly what is your plan to carry on being able to pay your bills?
Number two, evacuation. If you have to leave because of the hurricane, it's your job to know exactly where you're going, pre-approved. You don't want to land in a hotel and then expect some magic other thing to pay for it. You want to have a calm, relaxing place to go that's friends or family and that you have an ability to sit there for a period of time until things right themselves after everything comes completely apart.
Lastly, a disaster impact reduction. Think about loss of critical infrastructure. I always like to say two to three weeks, the power may come off earlier. But if you think about if you're at your house right now and I turn off the power and the gas line for the next three weeks, exactly what are you ready to do that?
And that's kind of that's kind of an assessment for hurricanes, right? Can you provide potable water? Do you have a way to cook your food? Do you have a way to communicate with the outside world that does not require cell phones, telephone lines or the internet?
You may not and that's perfectly fine. And do you have the ability to provide immediate first aid and stabilize an injured patient because the likelihood that 911 is available is pretty much a big fat zero and people are seeing this in ocean now. I mean, they're on day five and six and most of them still don't have 911 access. So even any other life that has happened since the hurricane cannot be dealt with through 911 and it's hard for people to wrap their head around that, right?
We built this system where we've transferred all the responsibility for our rescue to this magical thing called the state with this beautiful thing called 911 and then when we take away 911 and it can't come back for days at a time, people fail to understand that's your responsibility to be able to deal with everything that you would normally call 911 for without access to government assistance. It'll come back. It always does. But during that interview period, it's up to you.
So hopefully today's episode was a little bit helpful tips on how to prepare for a hurricane. If you're not certain that I'm right, if you disagree with me, drop us a line inside my new head.ca, send me an email at Jeff at preparedness labs.ca. Jump on any one of my social media feeds and tell me what you think, right? If you think that what I said here is incorrect, if you think I'm missing something, throw it together.
The point being is this is on you. Your failure to plan and your failure to prepare does not create an emergency for the state to come flying in and rescue your butt because you failed to execute your responsibilities. It's blunt. It's uncomfortable, but welcome to the world of preparedness.
And when you get around that and you start taking care of your own and you start becoming responsible for your own outcomes, you look around in the world and you shake your head when other people are waving and going, I've got no power, no food, no water. Somebody has to come feed me. Where am I going to stay? And you're like, wow, wow, I'm so glad I didn't put myself in that situation.
Anyhow, take care, have yourself a great week and we'll see you next week.