Where is the hurricane/fire coverage?

hbic - August 6, 2020

Meta

I’ve been kind of surprised to not see even mentions of recent natural disasters on the blog or the forum. There are millions without power due to Tropical Storm Isaias right now and  thousands were evacuated from the Apple Fire this weekend, and both of those seasons are just starting. Would love to see some new content geared towards preparing for hurricanes & wildfires, particularly with COVID potentially complicating evacuation plans. Thoughts?

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Thanks for speaking up about how TP can be better.

Besides the existing hurricane prep guide, electrical outage guides/gear, and the core guides that underpin everything (eg. BOB list), what would you like to see? Keeping in mind we don’t really cover general news since that’s well covered elsewhere.

Not saying we’ve got everything covered / are already perfect. I’m just wondering what you’d expect to see but aren’t.

On the wildfire side: We don’t have a scenario-specific guide for that yet. Definitely want to and will, though! It’s not for lack of desire, just lack of resources/time. Part of why we’ve launched this forum (and some other new stuff coming out this month) is to make it easier for people to chip in, kind of “wiki style”, so that more of this content is covered better and more quickly. Our small team has been working nights and weekends to scale, but we need help 🙂

 

Sure! Off the top of my head, here are some hurricane-related topics I’d love to see covered in depth:

• Realities of evacuation vs riding out a storm
• What evacuation shelter living is like and what preparations can be made specific to that scenario
• How filing insurance claims work and what docs to keep handy/organized and how 
• All aspects of prepping for emergencies with kids (I notice this has been requested in comments, etc a ton)
• Prepping for elderly family members
• Prepping for disabled folks
• How COVID changes hurricane/disaster prep dynamics
• How to deal with mosquitos & other pests in emergency situations
• Safely staying cool w/o electricity
• Some full gear reviews/coverage I’d like to see: window protection, waders, rafts, gas shutoff tools, emergency toilet supplies (I imagine this would be fun to stress test 😈)

I’m not sure I fully understand the “general news” caveat — the COVID roundups seem to be entirely general news — but I would think there are prep-relevant lessons that can be extracted from the news as we face disasters this season. For example, looking at how long it’s taking for power to restored post-Isaias would be informative as we figure out how long to stock up for.

 

Thank you for the great thoughts. The feedback is taken, but to share some of how we think about that / what’s going on behind the scenes:

Most importantly: We already plan on covering essentially everything in that list, because they are valuable topics! 

The constraint is how much we can get done internally. Until March, everything on TP was done by just three people. We’ve grown the team with the covid surge, but there’s still only a few of us working on content.

So while topics like prepping for disabled folks are very worthwhile, we’re focused on the more 101 stuff that is still missing, eg. some of the basic food and defense content going up this summer, like an upcoming guide on building up your food stores with common supermarket stuff. 

That said — the launch of this forum and some other stuff we’re working on (some of which releases this week!) is for people in the community who’ve been asking to chip in, almost wiki-style. We hope that helps scale things up, since we’re limited on what we can do otherwise + there’s a lot of great knowledge in the community (it just needs a little help getting organised.)  

So, to the extent you’re interested in those topics and want to contribute any thoughts, please do! eg. Can make a forum thread on a topic.

General news: The difference between COVID and the hurricane is that there isn’t anything new about the hurricane, how to prep for them, etc. (at least, as far as we’re aware, and we don’t expect there to be.) The covid coverage gets a little newsy because the prep takeaways are evolving as we learn about the novel virus.

Vice versa, there’s nothing about Isais that changes the “how long to stock up for” type questions. The recommendations/articles around this site are already based on that kind of data + variability.