I’m a tropics-dweller starting my annual hurricane prep early, AMA and glad to join this board

[tropicaltailwind]

Hello
I live on a small flat island at high risk of hurricanes, flooding, power outages. I’m British but have lived here since 2011. I’ve always been interested in resilience, being ready for life’s curveballs but obviously living here brings it all up several gears.
At some point I will move back to the UK with DH & DS, so I’m interested in people’s takes on prepping in UK, and am also happy to talk about how we prepare here, in case learning about how people plan for unexpectedly being off-grid, dealing with supply chain shortages, loss of water supply, and building resilience other threats is useful.

Sounds interesting!

What are some of the least obvious things you prep?

hi there,

Tropical islander here as well. No plans to move back to my native European country, but always having preparations here as we live quite remote on the island, with one road towards our house, which means we cannot get around normally if blocked. Having preps due to this in and around the house.

Nice to meet a fellow island person! Are you at risk for hurricanes too?

Ooh good q. Trying to think of things that are different to what non-tropical prep looks like. Water, power, food, meds, tools, cash, those sort of readiness focus are likely not that different.

Things that people in UK probably don’t have to think about are scorpions coming into the house when it rains, weevils in food stores, having a machete to take coconuts inside so they don’t become missiles in bad weather & can be used for food/hydration, filling bathtub for when water gets turned off, and uploading videos of house inside and out before severe weather for storm damage claims.

We love just below the hurricane belt so not every year that we are hit but every year we always get a few warnings that hurricanes might develop our way and every decade one hits our island. We are actually overdue on the latter so taking more preparations in order to ensure that if it does hit we are prepared. Does not help in that sense that we live quite remote and close to the coastline as well, althought no beach on this part of the island. We always ensure to have sufficient water stored as our utility company is not the most reliable anyways. We are lucky to have a power supply here which is not provided by the utility company but by the company who owned these houses in the past and they have a huge generator so until now worst case was power outage of an hour, which is nothing compared to the rest of the island where black outs of 24 hours and more regularly occur.

What type of measures specific for a tropical climate have you taken?

We have a couple of portable power stations which we can charge off a petrol inverter generator to run box fans, as well as charge devices and laptops.
this one, the EcoFlow River Pro can charge fast in 1.5 hours https://www.ecoflow.com/uk/river-pro-portable-power-station

And we also have a big 8000w petrol generator but as this is very expensive to run, and noisy, we would only run it a few hours a day to power the split a/c in the garage for a bit of respite, and to cook the days food. It would be great to have a fridge but we can’t justify the cost so we empty out the freezer before the season gets going, cook all the frozen meat and fish and eat it, and pack the freezer part of the fridge freezer with large bottles of water, small bottles of water and ziplock bags of water laid sideways to pack every inch.

The bottles need to be 75% full or they burst. A freezer full of frozen water will help keep the fridge cold for 76 hours, if you keep the fridge door closed. And obviously you can then drink it as the ice melts.

We move things we will be eating during the day into a cooler with a few frozen bottles of water to keep cool.

Daily routine for a major hurricane would be running both generators early morning, making coffee, cooking soup/pasta/rice and putting into flasks to eat during the day and then bringing generators inside for fear of looting. Before sundown we would use the gas camping stove to make hot flatbread in a cast iron pan and eat with canned tuna and salmon and beans, with canned fruit or scavenged coconut and mango for dessert.

We keep lots of water and a Britta filter to remove plastic bottle taste, and I have a gravity filter and a water barrel. I also fill every empty jar with lids and empty wine bottle instead of recycling once it’s summer, with filtered water from the fridge. If a hurricane is incoming we also fill the bathtub and buckets.
If the water doesn’t work and the WC cannot be flushed, a heavy duty trash bag inside the WC with cat litter is used.

Diseases / hygiene are a high risk so I keep lots of bleach and sanitizer and disinfecting wet wipes and mosquito spray, empty out any standing water in yard after the storm wear full coverage loose clothing and hats to avoid being bitten.

Good luck with the hurricane season prep.