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Letter Re: Observations on Preparedness from a Gulf Coast Hurricane Veteran

Mr. Rawles,
I just wanted to let you know how much I have enjoyed your site. I had no idea that there were whole survivalist communities out there until I stumbled on a link by accident. In fact, I didn’t really know that I fit into that category myself. My wife and I live on the Gulf Coast and we discovered the hard way during Hurricane Rita that a bag of trail mix and a bottle of water, was not preparing to evacuate. Eighteen hours in traffic in a hundred and fifty mile traffic jam taught us to find the roads that are not on a US map. After that we planned, made maps of blacktop roads for evacuation, and stocked a retreat a couple of hundred miles from the coast and cities.

Two years later here came Hurricane Ike. Since we had our gear pretty much laid out it only took us about an hour to load and we were gone. It was a vacation compared to the first time. After the storm blew threw we used some of the gas we had stashed and wanted to look at the house and see if there was anything left to come back to. The trip was eye opening. There were people sitting in gas lines that stretched for more than a mile for five gallons of fuel. Some people where sitting at stations that didn’t even have gas because they just couldn’t go any farther. There was no food or water to be found. I thought to myself what if the trucks didn’t come back or the electricity didn’t come back on for an extended time frame.

People can speculate if there is going to be nuclear war, Peak Oil or the economy is going to complete collapse. People have been saying “The End is Near” for a few thousand years, but this was real, we saw it, and we were in it. We made our trip. The house was damaged but still there. We checked to make sure everything was secure and left back for our retreat. We stayed for about two weeks in semi-comfortable conditions. We are not where we want to be as far as being stocked up for an extended time frame but we are getting there. By the time next storm season comes we should have supplies for about two months and we are installing solar power to augment our generator and propane systems. That is a pretty short time for some of your readers but considering the rest of the people I have seen, this is living like a king. After that it’s a squirrel on a stick. - Randall

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