Dear gunner,
From an email today....


Some time ago you mentioned some disaster preparedness tips on the
metalworking news group and I just wanted to write and say thanks.
Thanks.
When hurricane Isabel came through Charlottesville Virginia we
had quite a time but thanks in part to some of your posts my family
and I were somewhat ready. I had taken your suggestion and stocked up
on a number of items you listed that Sam’s club had and we lived on
them for a bit.
Though we live in a small city, we didn’t have power for about
five days: enough time for refrigeration to become a distant memory.
My wife laughed when I bought all the canned stuff but it’s nearly all
gone now. Stocking up on water also proved to be a good thing.
I had some additional thoughts that you might find interesting:
The idea of a small steam plant/ generator has a whole lot more
appeal now for a reason I did not expect. Steam power is quiet
whereas portable gas generators make a whole lot of noise. Also, in a
real disaster, the supplies of gas are going to last about five
minutes. Here in Charlottesville, we never ran out of gas, but there
wasn’t a whole lot of power to pump it either. Most of the city
didn’t have power for about 48 hours.
In a larger disaster, I would find loud gas generators something
of an advertisement that you might not want to make. A small steam
plant would quietly let you continue without irking neighbors. That
might sound minor, but believe me, it’s not. In our typical housing
development, those who ran gas generators got shunned.
Something I used a whole lot: an inverter for the car that let us
have two 500 watt ac outlets for the computer and the gas fired water
heater. We have one of those new on-demand gas hot water heaters. It
needs a small amount of juice to both think and kick off the gas
burner. The inverter cost about 30 bucks at Sams. Best 30 bucks I ever
spent. Idling the car every once and a while was fine.
Thankfully we always had a phone line, so we kept internet
service, and with that up to date outside news. Our local news
station and the local paper was often not so good, probably because
the people writing and publishing it were having to deal with their
own problems.
Anyway, thanks again. You can post this on the RCM if you like.
I’ve not got a news server connection at the moment.

Charles Morrill

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"You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle
behind each blade of grass." --Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto