Hope you are nowhere near a body of water. We were flooded out from Hurricane Flo which was only a cat 1 or 2 when it arrived but sat over NC for 3 days and dumped all that water over us. Spent a few days picking up debris and then the flood waters hit. I live near the Cape Fear river. We had 6 feet of water in our driveway spill over in 12 hours. We lost a lot of our heavy furniture we couldn’t lift upstairs including an upright piano. It took a week before the water receded so we could get back in the house. We left the days after the flood by boat with 5 animals. Had to gut the whole first floor down to the studs had it mitigated by a remediation company. Cost 60k to do that even before we could begin to rebuild. Took us a year to get back home again. We did have FEMA insurance I’m even though we were in the less than 1 % chance of flood. But we maxed it out. Even got an audit from the IRS bc we got all that money from them. Had to prove our home when built cost us that much to build. Luckily my paperwork was upstairs and not lost to the flood.
Good lord. We're so worried here about just getting through the next few days. Not a lot of talk about what life is going to be like in the months that follow.
I live in an area far from any water - in between the desert and the mountains but four houses down from me is a large flood zone. I have never seen it get high enough to reach the first house but I have seen it come close. It's unlikely but not unrealistic that it could reach my house.
What advice would you give? Is there anything you wish you had done differently?
I'm mentally preparing myself for picking up broken glass a 2:00 AM without any electricity while everything in my house blows around while getting drenched, but what else should we be mentally prepared for.
Fill up your bathtub with clean water; you can use some for drinking if need be, but mostly it's so you can flush your toilet should the water be shut off. No electricity = no power to the pumps at the water main station.
As much light as you can get. Batteries, small solar-powered lamps, whatever. A generator is great but you can use those things if you don't have one.
Have some books to read or something else to do to pass the time.
Set your phone to "text only" to save the battery. Try to talk to people well outside the storm zone who can get you good info on what's going on. You will be in something of a blackout and the rumours will fly. Verify everything!
Be careful of who's wandering around afterwards. Looters love to move in right after the storm and see what they can get.
Well we never go far from home now in the months of August, September, or Early October. We saved many items in our home bc we have a large unfinished space on our second floor. Took us time but we brought up area rugs, chairs, small end tables, lamps and whatever we could carry, I would suggest you bring any valuables that you would not want to see damaged up incase of flood. We had plenty of time to bring stuff upstairs but in a desert you may have faster water.
Never beleve you cant get hit with flood waters even in a desert. Prepare as if you will. We had double the water from our worst hurricane. The river gauges were under water so we had no way of knowing how much or how high it was gonna get. As we left our home the morning after the flood we were sloshing through the water on the first floor taking pictures down off the walls!
Have a go bag ready for all members of your family including any pets ahead of the storm. Keep it where you can grab and get out of the way if there is flood waters. We could have left before the flood as we had plenty of warning but we didn't want to go with five animals. Had nowhere to go actually After the storm even though the water didn't rise for 3 days the trees were down all over the neighborhood and county. Think if you should leave before the storm arrives and if not how you would exit your home if you are surrounded by water and it is rising. You don't want to be trapped in your home. If needbe keep an axe in an attic to use to climb up on a roof.
Have insurance info, important papers and numbers handy and in water safe area.
When tragedy strikes there will be NO power, no clean water, and even in our case we couldn't even use the toilets after the flooding started too much water infiltrated the sewers. The first thing I did that morning when I saw the water crest over our main road into our pond out back was take a shower. And had my husband walk our 6 lb toy poodle who was in agony the rest of the afternoon and night wanting to go outside while we were totally surrounded by water. He wouldnt use the piddle pad I put down for him in an upstairs shower until the next morning. Poor guy!
Order something to charge your phone during power outtage. Our neighbor's phone went dead during the night and he had to yell out of his window to get people to rescue him and his dog.
You will need LOTS of WATER at home. I am a prepper, but realize there is not much I can do if we flood here. I had plenty of bottled water even had water stacked in our attic area We used the stacked water to wash dishes from our refridge and freezer when we got back after the flood. I used up 6 large containers just to wash those dishes. My extra dried food stores were upstairs but no way to use them as we were flooded out of the home.
We never put in a generator here but were planning to buy and install one. It would have been underwater. So glad we never bought it. My neighbors all lost theirs in the flood. We have a small generator not a whole house one in case power goes out from an ice storm. Get yourself one if you can even if it requires gas/propane so you can save your freezer items if you have a separate freezer, Insurance will only cover $500 worth of food in a fridge. We claimed it.... but had a big freezer too and lost a lot of food. Only thing our insurance covered was that. We had FEMA insurance.
Do you have a second story to your home at all where you could potentially store items you wish to keep if you do flood? Do you have a crawl space/basement or are you on a slab. It will flood fast if you are on a slab. We had a 5 foot crawl space. So had roughly a foot in our first floor. It doesn't matter if you have 4 inches or 4 feet in your home. You will need to strip down to the baseboards up to 4 feet (wallboard panels come in 4 feet sheets) to mitigate your home so you don't have mold or mildew build up after the flood. And everything needs to be sanitized and we even had a mold specialist come in and test everything before we closed up the house again. After the wood completely dried up it was spray painted with white paint that had mold killer in it just in case.
As for what we would do differently. If it happens again, we would mitigate the home take our money and run. I would never rebuild this home again. It was a nightmare. Ended up in court with our original builder who built this home two years before the flood. I had some very custom features I wanted him to restore. He was cutting corners everywhere he could even though our contract stated he would rebuild it to the original build. We held back paying him in full until everything was done. Our lawyer said that was legit based on our contract. The builder even took cabinets he made and installed in our rebuilt home as collateral. Even took off the knobs and sanded the panels on the doors down on both sides and finally returned them after we sicked the county sherrif after him with a warrant. This after 3 letters from our lawyers to return the doors and drawers! Apparently the judge didn't believe he had stolen our cabinets and drawers even though our lawyer said it was a felony. We lost our court case with him, unfortunately, bc the judge believed he took them to fix them. After builder stole them we didn't want him back to finish. So according to judge we had to pay him for the remainder we owed him we reneged on the contract.. So he either paid off the judge or we ended up with a very dumb judge in a kangaroo court who didn't understand the case. Judge was a Democrat appointed by our Dem governor.
I don't think you will have anything to worry about wind-wise - it's supposed to be a tropical depression by the time it hits CA. Rain is another story though. If you live in a low area maybe get some sandbags for your house, and have an axe or a chainsaw ready if you need to cut through your roof from inside the attic. People have drowned in their attics during floods because they thought they were going above the water level but it went over their house and they got trapped.
Power outages are bad as well. I was in San Diego when that electrical transmission line was cut around 2012 or 2013. I was fortunate because I was actually contracting for Sempra Energy (doing cyber) so I just went to the data center and helped them keep their customer tweets online while chilling in the AC. It was however terrifying when I had to leave for the night and go back to my hotel. Don't go anywhere after dark if the power is out. That also means the traffic lights are out. People fly through an intersection at night if the light isn't red...
It's too late for you now, but for anyone living in a hurricane area I suggest getting one of these: https://waterbob.com/
Much more sanitary than filling your tub with water.
Hope you are nowhere near a body of water. We were flooded out from Hurricane Flo which was only a cat 1 or 2 when it arrived but sat over NC for 3 days and dumped all that water over us. Spent a few days picking up debris and then the flood waters hit. I live near the Cape Fear river. We had 6 feet of water in our driveway spill over in 12 hours. We lost a lot of our heavy furniture we couldn’t lift upstairs including an upright piano. It took a week before the water receded so we could get back in the house. We left the days after the flood by boat with 5 animals. Had to gut the whole first floor down to the studs had it mitigated by a remediation company. Cost 60k to do that even before we could begin to rebuild. Took us a year to get back home again. We did have FEMA insurance I’m even though we were in the less than 1 % chance of flood. But we maxed it out. Even got an audit from the IRS bc we got all that money from them. Had to prove our home when built cost us that much to build. Luckily my paperwork was upstairs and not lost to the flood.
Good lord. We're so worried here about just getting through the next few days. Not a lot of talk about what life is going to be like in the months that follow.
I live in an area far from any water - in between the desert and the mountains but four houses down from me is a large flood zone. I have never seen it get high enough to reach the first house but I have seen it come close. It's unlikely but not unrealistic that it could reach my house.
What advice would you give? Is there anything you wish you had done differently?
I'm mentally preparing myself for picking up broken glass a 2:00 AM without any electricity while everything in my house blows around while getting drenched, but what else should we be mentally prepared for.
Fill up your bathtub with clean water; you can use some for drinking if need be, but mostly it's so you can flush your toilet should the water be shut off. No electricity = no power to the pumps at the water main station.
As much light as you can get. Batteries, small solar-powered lamps, whatever. A generator is great but you can use those things if you don't have one.
Have some books to read or something else to do to pass the time.
Set your phone to "text only" to save the battery. Try to talk to people well outside the storm zone who can get you good info on what's going on. You will be in something of a blackout and the rumours will fly. Verify everything!
Be careful of who's wandering around afterwards. Looters love to move in right after the storm and see what they can get.
Sage advice! Thank you!
Well we never go far from home now in the months of August, September, or Early October. We saved many items in our home bc we have a large unfinished space on our second floor. Took us time but we brought up area rugs, chairs, small end tables, lamps and whatever we could carry, I would suggest you bring any valuables that you would not want to see damaged up incase of flood. We had plenty of time to bring stuff upstairs but in a desert you may have faster water.
Never beleve you cant get hit with flood waters even in a desert. Prepare as if you will. We had double the water from our worst hurricane. The river gauges were under water so we had no way of knowing how much or how high it was gonna get. As we left our home the morning after the flood we were sloshing through the water on the first floor taking pictures down off the walls!
Have a go bag ready for all members of your family including any pets ahead of the storm. Keep it where you can grab and get out of the way if there is flood waters. We could have left before the flood as we had plenty of warning but we didn't want to go with five animals. Had nowhere to go actually After the storm even though the water didn't rise for 3 days the trees were down all over the neighborhood and county. Think if you should leave before the storm arrives and if not how you would exit your home if you are surrounded by water and it is rising. You don't want to be trapped in your home. If needbe keep an axe in an attic to use to climb up on a roof.
Have insurance info, important papers and numbers handy and in water safe area.
When tragedy strikes there will be NO power, no clean water, and even in our case we couldn't even use the toilets after the flooding started too much water infiltrated the sewers. The first thing I did that morning when I saw the water crest over our main road into our pond out back was take a shower. And had my husband walk our 6 lb toy poodle who was in agony the rest of the afternoon and night wanting to go outside while we were totally surrounded by water. He wouldnt use the piddle pad I put down for him in an upstairs shower until the next morning. Poor guy!
Order something to charge your phone during power outtage. Our neighbor's phone went dead during the night and he had to yell out of his window to get people to rescue him and his dog.
You will need LOTS of WATER at home. I am a prepper, but realize there is not much I can do if we flood here. I had plenty of bottled water even had water stacked in our attic area We used the stacked water to wash dishes from our refridge and freezer when we got back after the flood. I used up 6 large containers just to wash those dishes. My extra dried food stores were upstairs but no way to use them as we were flooded out of the home.
We never put in a generator here but were planning to buy and install one. It would have been underwater. So glad we never bought it. My neighbors all lost theirs in the flood. We have a small generator not a whole house one in case power goes out from an ice storm. Get yourself one if you can even if it requires gas/propane so you can save your freezer items if you have a separate freezer, Insurance will only cover $500 worth of food in a fridge. We claimed it.... but had a big freezer too and lost a lot of food. Only thing our insurance covered was that. We had FEMA insurance.
Do you have a second story to your home at all where you could potentially store items you wish to keep if you do flood? Do you have a crawl space/basement or are you on a slab. It will flood fast if you are on a slab. We had a 5 foot crawl space. So had roughly a foot in our first floor. It doesn't matter if you have 4 inches or 4 feet in your home. You will need to strip down to the baseboards up to 4 feet (wallboard panels come in 4 feet sheets) to mitigate your home so you don't have mold or mildew build up after the flood. And everything needs to be sanitized and we even had a mold specialist come in and test everything before we closed up the house again. After the wood completely dried up it was spray painted with white paint that had mold killer in it just in case.
As for what we would do differently. If it happens again, we would mitigate the home take our money and run. I would never rebuild this home again. It was a nightmare. Ended up in court with our original builder who built this home two years before the flood. I had some very custom features I wanted him to restore. He was cutting corners everywhere he could even though our contract stated he would rebuild it to the original build. We held back paying him in full until everything was done. Our lawyer said that was legit based on our contract. The builder even took cabinets he made and installed in our rebuilt home as collateral. Even took off the knobs and sanded the panels on the doors down on both sides and finally returned them after we sicked the county sherrif after him with a warrant. This after 3 letters from our lawyers to return the doors and drawers! Apparently the judge didn't believe he had stolen our cabinets and drawers even though our lawyer said it was a felony. We lost our court case with him, unfortunately, bc the judge believed he took them to fix them. After builder stole them we didn't want him back to finish. So according to judge we had to pay him for the remainder we owed him we reneged on the contract.. So he either paid off the judge or we ended up with a very dumb judge in a kangaroo court who didn't understand the case. Judge was a Democrat appointed by our Dem governor.
I don't think you will have anything to worry about wind-wise - it's supposed to be a tropical depression by the time it hits CA. Rain is another story though. If you live in a low area maybe get some sandbags for your house, and have an axe or a chainsaw ready if you need to cut through your roof from inside the attic. People have drowned in their attics during floods because they thought they were going above the water level but it went over their house and they got trapped.
Power outages are bad as well. I was in San Diego when that electrical transmission line was cut around 2012 or 2013. I was fortunate because I was actually contracting for Sempra Energy (doing cyber) so I just went to the data center and helped them keep their customer tweets online while chilling in the AC. It was however terrifying when I had to leave for the night and go back to my hotel. Don't go anywhere after dark if the power is out. That also means the traffic lights are out. People fly through an intersection at night if the light isn't red...
It's too late for you now, but for anyone living in a hurricane area I suggest getting one of these: https://waterbob.com/
Much more sanitary than filling your tub with water.