Create an emergency preparedness plan.
I live in a part of North Carolina that’s prone to hurricanes. Not directly on the coast, but depending on the path of the storms and where they make landfall, we definitely get the effects. Sometimes pretty severely. In 2015, Hurricane Matthew combined with a cold front coming through and brought in one of those hundred year floods. We were without power for 4 days since we lived in an apartment at the time and couldn’t use a generator. Two years later, Hurricane Florence came through. It was only a category 1 storm, but it moved so slowly when it got here that we had yet another 100 year flood. That time we were told to evacuate our apartment because of the big river that was about a mile behind us. We evacuated to my mother-in-law’s house in the middle of the city. The Sunday of the storm, the staff of my school had to pack up anything close to the floor in case of flooding. There was a creek behind the property that fed into that big river. With Matthew, the creek flooded and washed out a bridge next to the school. Florence made the creek just as high, but the bridge stayed in tact.
With that said, we’re used to hurricanes at this point. But since the prompt asked for a plan, this is what they tell you to pack in a hurricane kit…
What we actually do is put a flashlight on the dining room table so we can find it easily. We put gas in our cars in case we need to evacuate a long distance and we charge our phones. We also buy hurricane snacks. Stuff we can eat if we lose power. But just like popcorn at a movie theater, we always eat most of our snacks before the storm actually gets here.
In all honesty, we don’t prepare as much as people in Florida or along the coast do. We don’t get the direct hit from the storms. They’ve been on land around 100 miles or so by the time they get to us. So really, this graphic is more accurate…
Snow on the other hand…
Us southerners don’t handle snow very well. But that’s a story for a different day.
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