I live in LA so the biggest issue here is earthquakes and we’re (mostly) prepped for shelter in place. We’re far enough into an urban area that there’s no wildfire risk other than smoke.
We have several gallons of bottled water from costco (do these go bad? we don’t fill our own since I have no yard and water is precious here so I don’t want to be dumping that much water every 3 months). We also have a bunch of tuna and canned corn/green beans/tomatoes that I try to rotate through and replace on a yearly basis. We have extra batteries, some candles, and two small solar ‘lamps’. Finally, we keep all of our important documents in a small fireproof safe. I’m a little worried about the left risk of the safe and need to scan copies of everything onto a flash drive the lives in a different part of the house.
I have a gallon of water in my car along with a pair of old hiking shoes, a large tarp, and a crank flashlight in case an earthquake hits when I’m on the road and I get stranded. I should probably add a couple granola bars as well!
Bringing this back up because we talked about it over in the journals a bit:
If you live in an area that’s natural disaster prone – especially ones like wildfires, which are fast moving and require short notice evacuations – and you don’t have a landline, please make sure you’re signed up for reverse 911 with your county emergency services. Reverse 911 is automatically sent out to landlines and REGISTERED cells. There were people in the Paradise and Santa Rosa fires who only survived because they got that call in the middle of the night and it woke them up. So… yeah. Please sign up.
Update: however, turns out I can sign up for alerts from the US forestry service, which will be far more reliable and have more info on wildfires anyway. That’s an app rather than calls/texts, but I think it’ll work.
In addition to wills, advance directives and powers of attorney, another good thing to have is a letter of instruction. It tells your heirs what your final wishes are, where the money is, and who to contact. I sent an email with this information to my three stepdaughters before hurricane season last year.
An odd one, but anyway: Ponder and I are on different phone companies, so hopefully if one goes down the other will still be OK. We also switched his carrier to the one with the biggest coverage so we should have phone reception in more places when we go on car trips.
It worries me that this is Qld Urban Utilities saying this. They tend to be more vocal in the media when they have a model that predicts a higher than usual chance of something bad happening weather wise.
On our enormous list of things to do for the house is getting a water tank. The primary reason being for the garden, which as moved up in priority since we are probably a few months at most from water restrictions coming in, but also as general backup for during storms.
sadly.