So first of all, fuck hurricanes. Fuck them right in the eye. Second of all, whoever decided it would be a good idea to live on a giant peninsula outside the tropics, surrounded by large bodies of warm ocean water is a moron. I realized point two as I was looking at the five-day chart on Friday and it covered the entire goddamn state. There’s no good place to run that isn’t six plus hours by car (although we had no fewer than 4 non-Glibs offers). And the wife and I were both opposed to doing that for an unknown duration with four kids, two under two. As I write this on Tuesday afternoon, the storm continues to track south, so I guess a bunch of this is going to be not particularly useful, although we will get a bunch of rain, and the power will go out for a little while.

So we did all the standard stuff. Water, non-perishable food, a way to heat the food that isn’t dependent on electricity. Fine. We chose not to do the ritual where you fill random dodgy containers with gasoline. We have two full-ish tanks of gas in our cars and another five gallons besides, I have 2 five gallon gas canisters and one is always full and the other is always not empty. That’s your basic, we’re in the five day cone, shit.

When you’re in the middle of the 3 day cone, then it gets real. First choice: stay or go. We kind of covered that. The locally famous meteorologist (dude has a beer named for him) has a saying “run from the water, hide from the wind.” If you’re in the path of flooding or storm surge, just leave. [Post-hurricane edit: Seeing how fucked up Ft. Myers/Sanibel/Captiva got, just leave if you’re within the cone with 48 hours to go and you can get wrecked by a 10-15 foot surge.] If you live in manufactured home, you should probably go. If you have a giant oak of unknown age that could cave in your entire roof, maybe think about leaving. We live in a concrete block house 70 feet above the tide line, no giant trees, more than a mile inland. The amount of water it would take to flood us is basically a Yucatan-basin meteor strike. So we’re in the stay group. Although, if you have a place to fuck off to and entertain your family, I won’t judge. If it was me and the wife, I’d put in for some emergency time off and take a vacation. With four boys, one an infant and one a toddler, there is no vacation, only more kids to handle.

Now, let’s get to the fun stuff, what did we do differently between 2017 (Irma) and 2022 (Ian). Also, fuck I-named storms.

Chemistry is My Friend

TW, math ahead. Also, sorry for all the parenthetical text below, but I am playing fast and loose with units and certainty, two things that they try to beat out of you at E-school.

I have a chest freezer in the garage, but no generator. Should I have a generator? Probably, but buying one during the hurricane rush is a bad idea. What can I do to keep that stuff frozen for as long as possible? I happened to read a long article about how salting the water/ice bath in an ice-cream maker lowers the temperature of the whole system by about 10 degrees (F) as long as there is water and ice. And this is true, if you take an ice water mixture at 32F and add about 1.2 lbs of salt per gallon of water/ice, the temperature of everything will drop by 10F [Edit: I f’d up the unit conversions. This will depress the temperature by 10C or 18F]. What? Where does the heat go? More ice turns to water. If you get a chemical engineering degree, they will beat into your head the fact that the phase change energy of H2O far exceeds the amount of energy needed to raise or lower the temperature of the same mass of water in either phase. You can raise the temperature of a mass of water from 32F to 175F for the same amount of energy it takes to melt it as ice at 32F. So melting a little bit of ice can lower the temperature of the ice and the water a lot. It gets even better because you can lower the temperature of 2g of ice 1 degree for the same energy trade as 1g of water. Basically, one percent of the total mass of ice melts (in a 50/50 ice/water system) and it cools the whole system 10 degrees.

Science is badass, but what the hell does this have to do with my freezer? I replaced about 5 gallons of air (not very good at resisting temperature change) with a five gallon bucket of salt water. And the reason for salt water is that salt water melts at a lower temperature than meat, which is most of what I am trying to keep frozen. Meat “freezes” at about 28F. Air quotes indicate that not everything crystalizes, but we call it frozen. I want my sacrificial melting substance to melt before the meat. Water ice will keep my freezer at 32F (food safe) but not keep the meat technically frozen. I want the stuff in the bucket to melt first, not last.

I did the math on the the freezer, it uses both by the EnergyStar rating, and some online forums using actual measurements, about 2500 kJ/day (0.7kWh/day * 3600s/hr. 1 kW= 1kJ/s, so 0.7 Kwh/day = 2520 kJ/day, quit any time you’re having flashbacks of high school/college) of energy to maintain its temperature. Conveniently, the amount of energy it takes to melt a gallon of ice (we’re using gallon as a unit of mass here, but it was a gallon of water before we froze it, so approximately 8.32lb or 3.78kg) is approximately half that (lets assume that the efficiency of the compressor and the efficiency of a bucket of ice absorbing heat is approximately the same). So I can basically “buy” myself two and a half days without power for the cost of 9lb of salt in 5 gallons of water [*I’d try 6lb/5gal next time] . I ran this by OMWC and some other chemistry nerds and they agreed it wasn’t crazy. Think of it more like a thermal battery backup, compared to a generator.

[Post-hurricane update: Due to my bad math, after 2 days, I still had a slurry of salty ice water. 2 takeaways: First, do my temperature conversions. Second, I think a plastic bucket significantly slowed heat transfer, next time, I’ll probably use gallon ziplock bags. But it was all good, we never lost power.]

You can tell I never did Basic Training

We’ve had occasional water issues in this corner during heavy rainfall in the past, so I dug a trench and used the soil to make field expedient sandbags. Swiss, who has extensive experience sandbagging, gave me a gentleman’s C, and told me not to ever depend on my skills where water was actually expected to rise. Oh, and the pool fence in the background is coming down before the storm. I just have to make sure the toddler is secured for the storm before I secure the pool fence.

Adult Beverages and Battery Packs for Kids Devices

Don’t forget these. I also made sure the older two actually downloaded some movies to their local storage. No power equals no internets. You’re trapped with them for 12-36 hours before you can safely turn them out and not expect them to end up blown three blocks away, plan accordingly.

And don’t overindulge. Nothing worse than emerging the morning after and having to run a chainsaw with a hangover.

Cover the Windows Last

This is especially relevant with this storm, as it turned south before I got a chance to put up the plywood. Yes, yes, hurricane shutters are better, but I kept the plywood from 2017, so it was just installation this time. It gets really fucking dark once you cover the windows. Do that as late as you safely can. After that its all artificial light until the storm passes, and my experience was the house seems a whole hell of a lot smaller with the windows boarded up.

Never Assume You’re Safe until the Hurricane is Past

A lot of people in Southwest Florida thought they were safe because the projections had the hurricane well out to sea as it went past them. Hopefully, none of them paid with their lives, but it is important to remember that facing a hurricane is like standing in front of someone shooting a shotgun at 30 yards. You can’t tell by looking down the barrel whether you’ll be hit, winged, or killed. In the end, we never even lost power, although people 5 blocks away were down for a day, and some friends well inland in the Tampa ex-urbs are still out a day later. Its a total crap-shoot. We raked up the yard, put all the furniture and the pool fence back out, and spent the day after trying to keep the kids entertained outside.