Hurricane Season Check Up
Hurricane Season Check Up
Hurricane Season is here again. For preppers on the East coast, this means paying a little more attention to the weather. Most preppers are always trying to perfect their preparedness, so being prepared for a hurricane is pretty well taken care of already. For me, the first month of hurricane season is not spent running around buying canned goods, bottled water, batteries and flashlights. We never allow our stock of these essential items to get depleted. I use this time of year to do annual or semi-annual maintenance on my preps.
Water
We keep our old plastic juice containers and fill them up with tap water. We have about 40 gallons stored. Water tends to get a bit stale after a year so this is a good time to change it out. If you want to be extra safe, you can add 8 drops of bleach per gallon to make sure your water lasts the entire year. This is also a good time of year to make sure your extra bleach stock is adequate. Bleach can also be used to purify water if the supply is tainted. Each gallon requires 8 drops for clear water and 16 drops for cloudy water. We also have 2 rain catch barrels that hold 50 gallons each. These may be needed to catch drinking water, so this is a good time of year to give them a good cleaning. We will pick up a few more water filters for our filter pitcher also. If you have to sterilize your water with bleach, you will be glad you have a filter pitcher to remove the taste.
Recharge
This is a great time of year to top off all of your rechargeable batteries and devices. We have Midland 2 way radios that can be charged on a charger or with batteries. I will be recharging them this week so we won’t have to use precious batteries if the power goes out. The Midlands are also our weather radios. I will also recharge all of the miscellaneous rechargeable batteries including those for tactical lights.
Rotate
This is one of two times per year that we rotate everything. The other time is after Christmas. I will go through our bug out bag and rotate all of the long term food storage items. I will also rotate the stored gasoline by filling up the car with the stored gas and refilling the gas cans and adding fresh stabilizer. This is also a good time to check your fire extinguishers and change your batteries to your smoke detectors. You should also rotate all of your semi automatic fire arms magazines. The springs in the magazines can take a set and loose their tension. Don’t fill them all the way to the top either. Fill them one round short for pistol magazines and two rounds short for 30 round rifle magazines. If you don’t have extra magazines to be able to rotate, get them now while they are available. We just saw how tight the market can get on magazines.
If you are new to prepping and not sure what you need for hurricane season, read our 7 Step Survival Plan. You will be very well set for hurricane season if you follow all of the tips there. Click here to view The NOAA 2013 Hurricane Season Predictions.
Happy Prepping!
