I Wish I Stockpiled These Before The Hurricane Hit

While I may not always be the top-notch prepper I, perhaps, should be; I do like to be prepared. In fact, whenever a storm is forecast to hit us, I’m usually one of the ones making sure we have water in the tub and a little extra food tucked away.

Hurricane Helene was forecast, at 12:30 am on September 27th, to strike Atlanta and that area. I am well over 200 miles away from Atlanta and we were supposed to get some rain and perhaps 15 mph winds. No big deal.

It turned and crushed us with absolutely no warning. At 3:30 in the morning, all I could hear was sheet metal being ripped off of our various livestock run-ins, the screams of our livestock, and trees crashing all around us. It was (and still is) bad.

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Though we didn’t lose anyone during the two weeks our power and water were off, it was rough. Looking back, there are some items that would have been very helpful to have. While I will always tell you that hoarding just prevents your neighbors from surviving, there is nothing wrong with grabbing an extra pack or this or that. Just in case.

Today, we’ll be looking at what I wish I’d stockpiled before Helene came and ate us up. Please note that I am not in Asheville, NC but that I am in an area in Georgia that was absolutely destroyed. Asheville stood no chance no matter what they had stockpiled. We could have done better here.

Water, Food, and the Essentials

I am so grateful I paused in the store on September 26th and side-eyed the gallon jugs of water that helped keep my dogs alive. We ran out of water on Saturday instead of Friday night. Nothing was open on Friday. It was 90 degrees F. While the livestock tubs were full of water due to all the rain, the indoor pets did not have that luck.

Keeping 5-10 gallons of water on hand at all times is not a bad idea. While you can’t take all of it with you in an evacuation scenario, it can get you through those first 24-48 hours of a disaster until someone with a generator runs a hose out to the road- because local authorities certainly didn’t have water depots up until almost a week in.

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Unless you have a grill with charcoal (my preference) or some form of cooking fuel, you’ll be eating cold sandwiches and cereal. Bluntly, freeze a loaf of bread, and keep some peanut butter around. Grab an extra box of your favorite cereal. You may be a little hungry, but it’ll keep you from fainting.

My other big suggestion is to go ahead and have a grill ready. In the worst circumstances, you can use it to boil water if you have a couple of clean containers around. Get 4-5 bags of charcoal and keep them handy.

Paper Towels

The number one thing I wished I’d had more of was paper towels.

It’s not like you can wash your hands when the water is off. Sure, we could kind of scrub them a little with a rinse bucket, but it’s not the same as having running water. Hand sanitizer usually leaves a residue.

Paper towels fix a lot of this. We started wrapping our sandwiches with paper towels, using them as quickie paper plates, etc to keep from touching our food with our increasingly nasty hands. They are also, of course, good for cleaning up small messes and all the usual necessities there.

Buckets and Gas Cans

On day 2, one of the first things I did was run to Lowes. While people stood in line for generators (which were few and far between, and gas lines were well over 6 hours long), I went and found 3 gas cans and 15 5-gallon buckets with lids.

While the buckets are not necessarily food-safe, they are safe enough for livestock and pet water, as well as flushing toilets. I found a gas station, filled my cans and my truck (which was the only vehicle we could get out of), and stopped by a kennel up the road that had a generator and had run a hose out to the road. The sign they put up said, “free water, take what you need”.

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They are getting a free lamb for their freezer from us next year (worth approximately $600-$800 if you average out the cuts of meat). And if they are reading this, we owe you everything. And many, many people do. The lines would sometimes be 10, or 15 cars deep waiting for a chance at that hose. There was nowhere else to get water. And I don’t mean close by, I simply mean there was nowhere else.

Figure out how many buckets you need to purchase and buy them a few at a time over time. One of my closets is now nothing but buckets.

I also suggest talking to your local bakeries. Most of them get buttercream icing in buckets that are safe for food. While they are a pain to clean out, it may be worth it to you. Start storing them now.

The Little Things

Plastic cutlery, disposable cooking vessels (those aluminum trays, for instance; we were boiling water in the tin grease drip trays for grills to make things like rice-a-roni and instant potatoes), and cheap grill spatulas and/or tongs were all things that I had never even considered storing, but they were incredible to have once everything went sideways.

Batteries are nice, but we didn’t have fans until day 7 or 8.

My last tip is this: if you can get your hands on ice, 20 pounds per day will keep a modern fridge cold for 24-ish hours. Put it in a bucket because it is going to melt everywhere. But you can keep it cool enough to be safe for things like insulin, food you intend to eat within 24-48 hours, and so on and so forth. While you can’t necessarily prep having ice with no power, consider charting where ice is in your community. This makes it much easier to find when things are truly a mess.

What would you stockpile before a natural disaster? Tell us in the comments, we’d love to hear from you!

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