Help prepping for Tropical Storm

[FollowYourOwnNorthStar]

Hi All,

I’m hoping for some prepping advice. I live on the ocean, on east coast of Australia, we have a tropical cyclone about to hit land in about 30 hours.

I am not in one of the worst areas, or even close. I expect we will get terrible weather, winds and rain, flooded roads, possibly my garage may flood (but I live on a hill, so it should flow through from behind and onwards down), and power and internet cuts. There is no suggestion/need for evacuation for us. However our areas has had schools and businesses have still be closed for the next 2 days and there is lots of panic buying here.

I want to be prepared, but also sensible. I want to leave resources for those that need it, but also be ok to ride this out and hopefully resume life quickly on the other side with minimal damage, and to be able to help others.

To that end, this is what I have done. Is it enough? Too much? Any suggestions?

• All outdoor furniture moved in close to the house/undercover.
• Gutters cleared
• full tank of petrol in car
• Garage emptied, or only remaining things are plastic (ie: waterproof) up to about 1 metre (the garage has flooded once before, about 2-4 inches).
• Toiletries - Not bought any extra, what I have on hand normally will last me a few weeks.
• Food - bought extra milk and chocolate to eat! Otherwise, the food I have on hand or in freezer should last 1 week easily, and the pantry or freezer food would be fine for another 1-2 weeks (although meals might start to look weird).
• Water - I have 5L on hand in a container, as well as probably another 6L in the fridge/water bottles.
• A gas BBQ stove - can use if power goes out.
• 2 good, fully charged torches (for a total of 7 hours of battery life). Another smaller torch, but weak light.
• All electronic items in house have surge protectors at the powerpoint
• Phone and tablet fully charged
• 2 x powerbanks for phone and tablet

Problems - I won’t be able to use my CPAP machine if I lose power. Not sure what to do here.

I have lots of windows. Not sure weather to tape them, or something else? Or just monitor the situation as this may be over kill.

My outside lillypilly trees don’t over hang the house but are as tall as the house. I’m hoping as they are a thinner type tree, if any branches break off it would only be superficial damage to the side of the house.

Anything else I should do? I am following advice here, but it is mainly aimed (as it should be) at those in the epicenter. This is advice for someone much further away, but still likely to get some impact.

thank you.

Close all your curtains. If the window blows in, it should blow into your curtain first for a little protection.

Prep for clean up. Bring inside your brooms, shovels, tarps, ropes, welly boots, gardening gloves, ladders, bins, hammer and nails.

Have you your safe space prepared? Move your mattress into your hallway, walk in wardrobe or somewhere.

Go through your phone settings. Delete anything you don’t need so they don’t suck the power. You can reload next week. Go into settings and look at each app. Turn some off and turn off “Background App Refresh” on everything. Turn down your brightness. All this extends your battery life.

Have you got a contact person lined up somewhere else who can then put a notice on your fb page or something saying “I have heard from @FollowYourOwnNorthStar and she is safe”?

Have you batteries for your trannie? It will keep on picking up the ABC when your router/phone towers go down.

Sandbags. One in each toilet and one on the shower drain, bathroom and laundry drains, plugs in bath and all sinks.

Reddit preppers is a useful sub.

The sunset coast is thinking of you. I keep checking ABC News 24. Keep us posted next week, if you can. A report would be good.

You need more water, 3L per day per person. Fill the bath if required. No electric = no water.

Buy some tinned food and pasta/rice in case there is a long term power outage and the freezer food spoils. If there is a power outage try to open the freezer as little as possible.

and Good Luck! Hope it isn't too wild.

Rather than stocking up on water, we just have water purifying tablets.

Yes water is your main issue here. You need either more water or something to purify it. Bear in mind if a mains bursts or gets broken and there's no water pressure to your taps, you won't be able to get much water out of the taps to purify, so reliance on purification tablets alone isn't an ideal plan (this happened to me after a fire once and we were without water for 2 months thanks to an incompetent water company not fixing it). You could also fill your bath with water as a precaution for short term water access.

Also get some sticky tape and tape your windows in big X-shapes so if they smash you are less likely to be hit by flying glass. They used to do it in WW2 (when I was a child, my doctor's surgery were still doing it).

For the CPAP machine, is there something in your area where you can let the electricity company know you're vulnerable and reliant on the electricity supply so they can get you a generator in the aftermath if you're without power for a while? It's something you'd be able to do in some countries.

Safe to say that if OP needs more water in the next few days, she only needs to stick a pot outside.

Dried or tinned food, the freezer food won't be any good if the power goes out.
Camping stove, you can get small ones from camping shops with extra gas.
Wet wipes, you can have a wash and freshen up with a couple of wet wipes, saves water.
More bottled water

TheSandgroper · Today 10:54

Safe to say that if OP needs more water in the next few days, she only needs to stick a pot outside

Not ideal for drinking if she can’t boil it (or has water purification tablets)

Fill your bath for flushing the loo (although be careful with this if you've got little kids or animals)

Charge everything now

Tape your windows with X

Have all important docs like birth certificates / passports etc in one place in case you need to leave quickly - a go bag would be ideal. Have seen suggestions to put important stuff in your (empty) dishwasher!

If you're sheltering in an internal room, make sure you have boots / footwear in there incase you do need to leave.

Never walk in flood waters, apart from animals and sewage there could be downed power lines

It’s rainwater, straight off the sea! Fucking shitloads of it because it’s a slowly moving Cat 2 cyclone. She doesn’t need purification tablets. It’s perfectly safe. It might even be safe in England. Any number of Australian houses have had and still have rainwater tanks for drinking. I collect rainwater every winter for drinking. I just catch it off the shed roof. I certainly don’t boil it or use tablets.

Don’t know where you are, TheSandgroper but we wouldn’t be drinking rainwater “straight off the sea” here in the UK. Our seas are full of untreated sewage. It then falls through our polluted atmosphere.

You do you, that’s fine. I’d stick to boiling or purifying first, thanks 😁