#flood list

Here is some flood preparedness advice from my friend Amber who has experienced hurricanes, tied in with my own recent experience of having to evacuate our home quickly.  I hope this is helpful for anyone who is in a flood situation:

1. As soon as you hear that you are at risk for flooding, start packing:

- pack your bags as if you were going on a week long vacation. Take clothes, toiletries, medicine, etc.

- If you have pets, get their carriers and necessities out and ready to go.  

- Put together important paperwork like social security cards, passports, etc. and put it in your bag.

- Pack up your laptops, hard-drives, cameras, important photo albums and priceless valuables.  (If you don't have room, put these up in a high, safe spot, or follow tip # 2)

- Try to stay calm, take deep breaths and think positive thoughts.

2. If you have time to pack up, and you happen to have a boat or inflatable pool, put the inflatable in the middle of a room and load it with anything that you want to save but don't have room to take with you. (Amber told me a story of a family who loaded a small boat in their living room with photo albums before they left for shelter.  As the water flooded into the room, the boat rose, and their photo albums were kept safe.)

3. Place valuable objects up as high as you can, inside sealed plastic containers if possible.

4. Amber suggested sealing off doors with duct tape, and piling bags of rice along the bottoms.  The rice will absorb a lot of water and slow it down.  

5. Do a crawl check.  Crawl around your home and observe what's down there.  Unplug things from electrical outlets and place important items up as high as you can.  Use plastic bags to tie up the bottoms of tables and chairs.

6. Stay out of the water.  In California everyone knows you don't surf or swim after a big storm, or you risk bouts of chronic bronchitis and other nasty infections.  Flood water is full of run-off toxins like pesticides, gas, oil and sewage.  Yuck!  Not only that, but if a dam bursts suddenly upstream you could suddenly be caught up in a wall of water.  Don't be a soggy naked corpse found downstream.  Be smart. 

7. Stay aware of road closures and where the flooding is so that you can get to safety.  We chose to leave early and were lucky to get out before roads flooded and collapsed, but not everyone was so lucky.  There is always a lot of misinformation during major disasters, get your information from as official of a source as you can - local news stations and official government sites usually have fairly accurate information.  Random guy on twitter may or may not.

8.  If you are told to leave, get your loved ones and get out.  Your life is more important than your stuff.

9. As you leave, turn off your lights and shut down your breakers if you can.  Water hitting electricity can cause sparks which can lead to fires.  

10.  Head to high ground, find a safe place and wait it out.