Gratefully surreal

(A few emergency preparedness insights at the bottom half of this blog entry -- FWIW.)



Monday was my wife's first day at her new job: she'd left one uni- versity, and switched to another uni- versity across town.

And by Wed- nesday, both campuses were half-flooded. Weird.


A goodly chunk of down- town Brisbane is now under water: the waters peaked, appar- ently, in the early morning of Thurs- day, Jan. 13th. There's been a few incoming tides that have hindered the river's draining. Luckily, no rain (neither here, nor upstream) for the last few days -- so the total height was actually about a metre less than anticipated.


Mean- while, we're all the way on the other side of town. So except for the grocery stores being a bit under-stocked (there was a run on groceries the day or two before the flood's peak, and trucks haven't been able to get in to re-supply the stores), everything has been pretty normal on this side of town: we ran some errands at the mall, then spent most of the day at the park, with the kids; very few mudpuddles in sight (except for our front yard!).

Oh: And at the mall, about one out of every fifteen shops had a "Closed due to staff attending their flooded homes" sign on their (closed!) security grille.


Apparently, there's a few types of flooding. One is river flooding -- which we're super-unlikely to get, in our part of Brisbane. I think that's when people upstream from you get too much rain. Another type is stream/creek flooding -- when you have more rain than the local creeks can handle, so it finds additional drainage routes, like across roads and lawns. We get a bit of that on our side of town -- but if we get a gap of 4-5 hours between rains, it all drains away: it's just a temporary inconvenience.


By the way: In a "Survival at Sea" book that I have, it says that adults need a litre of water a day -- three litres in hot climates or when exerting yourself -- to survive. So over the weekend (prior to the main rush; in hindsight, we should've done this), we stocked up on liquids (in case the water mains break, or the city water supply becomes tainted). Bought some of those mega-jugs of water, plus extra does of soda pop (which we'd eventually use). Also stocked up on canned goods a bit (again, really should've done that sooner).

The Red Cross says that you should have enough food and water (per person!) for two weeks. There's a survival "rule of three" that says that (approximately), you can survive:

• Three minutes without air
• Three hours without shelter
• Three days without water, and
• Three weeks without food

Thus, we stocked up on liquids (water, soda pop, juice, etc.) -- figuring that if we under-estimated on the food, we'd be grumpy and uncomfortable, but generally OK (we'd just start eating sticks of butter, and drinking the olive oil...). But water, you **need**.

If the power went out, we'd have to use up the contents of the 'fridge as best as we could. But we could cook stuff, as our neighbors to either side have gas ranges in their kitchens. But -- we really **should** get one of those camp stoves.

And given that every two to three summers we seem to lose electricity for a day, getting one of those smaller portable generators for a few hundred bucks would be a good idea. Particularly since we have a cluster of five houses of family members within a few blocks of each other: many people would benefit from it. Refrigerators and freezers keep the cold in for a fairly long time, as long as you keep the door shut. So, we could pass it around, "refreshing" each 'fridge and freezer, to keep the food from going off.


In contrast, Mormons advocate having a year's supply of food. I don't know that we'll go quite **that** far. But certainly, I think having a month's supply of food and liquids for your household is not excessive, and both achievable (stash it under the bed?) and affordable.

In the case of a natural disaster, you **hope** that the authorities will get to you in a timely manner. But they may be otherwise occupied.


--GG