3 Responses to “Disaster Top 10”

1. Peter
   June 21st, 2012 - 6:21 pm

   About five years ago I attended some training sessions for a citizens’ disaster response organization. One thing I learned, that came as quite a surprise, is that one of the very biggest fears in the disaster-preparedness field is a severe winter ice storm. While an ice storm may not cause many deaths or destroy many houses, it can leave large areas without power for weeks and render most roads completely impassable. After a massive ice storm in Canada about 15 years ago tens of thousands of people were stranded in cold, dark houses for weeks, in some cases suffering from malnutrition.

2. Lynn
   June 21st, 2012 - 8:13 pm

   I can vouch for that! December ’07 we were without power for 10 days.

3. Hippie
   June 23rd, 2012 - 12:33 am

   I remember the ice storm. I used my fuzzy dog and my fuzzy blanket (No, really) to keep warm. I had a gas stove, and an old style coffee pot. My water heater was gas. It was strange. I had hot showers, hot coffee, cooked meals, even heat in the bathroom (Gas wall mounted space heater) but no lights. I had recently had my appendix out, and had to walk up 8 flights of stairs to a doctor’s office – the generators didn’t have the juice to run the elevators – just to find out they were closed. Could I have called? No. Phone lines are larger diameter than power lines, and collect more ice. So I had no phone either.

   Oddly enough, while many people assumed that everyone was desperate for things like chainsaws and generators, I found myself approached by several different people over the course of a week, checkbook or cash in hand, telling me to “name a price”. For my truck. I don’t have a nice shiny new one, I have a dented scraped sorry bucket of bent bolts with a big rumbling engine that would be perfect for hauling a bunch of brush to the dump.