Suggestion for reducing heating costs: get an oil filled electric heater to heat the area you are in, and reduce the thermostat temperature for the rest of the house.  They have wheels and are easy to move around.

While this is very specific, if you live in the Houston area, you NEED a Key Map of your county.  They are the gold standard for Harris and surrounding counties and locals have relied on them for decades.  20 years ago everyone had one in their car. Not so much today, but they are still available at https://www.keymaps.com/

I think the main incentive for disinformation is financial.  Advertising money goes to the media content with traffic, and pushing the conspiracy theories generate it.  Once you start watching it, the online algorithms start feeding it to you nonstop.  I relative has gotten wrapped up in it and sent me a few links to look at.  They were complete garbage, but similar themes popped up in my “suggested” feeds for a few weeks.  I think it our problem cumulative effect of deliberate disinformation for profit, the victims/believers spreading it, and the algorithms amplifying it to a frightening degree. 

Oh, forgot my plan of action.  Board up the windows, pack up the cars and head to family members home 300 miles away.  Goal is to leave well before the mandatory evacuations start.  We usually get 8-10 hours notice before they start here in Texas, not sure about other states.

Based on the news reports coming in the morning after – keep an axe in your attic so you can break out if trapped there by deep flood waters.  Especially important for single story homes.  Regarding the hotels filling up – leave anyway!  There are shelters available and you will be in a better position to find something in an area with functioning civilization (cell service, passable roads, emergency services).  Local businesses in surrounding areas will often allow you to stay in their parking lots, or indoors in some cases (check out Gallery Furniture in Houston for example) Realize your at home preps won’t matter when your roof is blown off and there is 8 ft of water in your house.  If you live within 20-30 miles of the coast, you have to accept that your house may simply be GONE if it’s a direct hit.  Look on reddit and twitter to see what this level of devastation looks like.  Leave if at all possible!  (if you don’t leave, be prepared for a water evacuation by boat)

Bob, the MSR camping fuel (and other brands) is a fuel blend (isobutane and propane). The containers have different threads than the Coleman propane bottles.  Most of the standard portable heaters and stoves/grills will use the propane connection. 

My thoughts based on personal experience… we evacuated for Hurricane Rita and faced a nightmare traffic scene.  We live in a mandatory evac zone and are required to leave (not everyone does, but riding out a big storm is very unpleasant and can be fatal if your house is damaged).  Roadblocks and traffic created nasty bottlenecks and dramatically slowed down traffic, but it wasn’t impossible.  It took us 20 hours to go north through Houston and then drive west to Austin (it’s normally a 4 hour trip).  The first 3 hours were on a short stretch of county road (about 10 miles).  A roadblock was set up at the highway intersection forcing everyone to turn north on the highway.  People stopped to ask questions and argue with the police which caused the slowdown. We spent the next 14 hours or so getting through Houston, this was a mix of highway and side streets.  Eventually we decided to stick to the highway and made it through.  We turned onto a smaller highway about 60 miles NW of Houston and the traffic broke up.  Travel becomes impossible when the road becomes physically impassable – traffic accidents, flooding, snow/ice, mudslides etc. Lessons learned…  -Leave BEFORE a mandatory evacuation starts – even 2-3 hours makes a big difference.  Stress this with anyone you discuss it with.  -Smaller roads are equally risky for delays, but if you know the area you may have better luck finding gas– Keep gas tanks full when a hurricane / wildfire / other dangerous situations are “nearby”.  -Cell signals will be overloaded and unreliable (maybe they are better now – we didn’t have smart phones at that point).  Have non-online maps if you want to take alternative routes.   Ironically Rita turned out to be a huge practice drill for Houston (the storm weakened some and turned at the last minute). Rita happened immediately after Katrina (which devastated our next door neighbor New Orleans), and Houston hadn’t experienced a major evacuation in many years. Local government officials over-reacted and didn’t coordinate well.  People in relatively safe areas were told to leave before the high risk coastal areas were evacuated.  The mess resulted in significant improvements – there is now a phased area wide evacuation plan, fuel delivery plans, and the ability to make major interstate highways one-way out of town to reduce delays (It’s called “contraflow”).  The next big hurricane (Ike) caused much more damage in the area, but lacked the evacuation horror stories.  Hopefully the area remembers the lessons.  If you evacuate a city/area which never experiences major evacuations, it’s much more likely to be a mess.

From experience I can tell you this happens on back country roads as well.  During hurricane evacuations roadblocks are set up at intersections to funnel everyone in the mandatory evacuation areas out into safe zones.  Usually this eases up as you get outside the coastal counties.  The key is to leave before the published mandatory evac time if you don’t want herded like cattle. These roadblocks become big bottlenecks because everyone stops to argue with the police and explain why they need to go the other way!  We once spent 3 hours to cover 10 miles due to this.

Thanks for the excellent suggestions!  I’d like to throw out a tangential idea – to help prepare for a short term crisis emotionally, put yourself in situations where you need to get by without the “luxuries” of modern life.  I specifically recommend primitive tent camping (or backpacking) – find a camp site without electricity or running water.  I’ve found this to be an unexpectedly useful form of mental/emotional prepping. Don’t bring a cooler – shelf stable food only (I confess that I bring one for drinks!).  Only battery powered electronics.  Try going somewhere without cell service.  Get comfortable cooking on portable stoves and collecting/drinking filtered water.  Ladies – learn to pee outside (I recommend funnels!).  Do this a few times a year until you are comfortable for duration of the trip.  Make this “practice” a fun trip and include things you want to do.  It shouldn’t be a weekend of deprivation.  This has several big benefits: – you practice using your gear and develop confidence in it. You learn it’s limitations, change it as needed, and learn what does and doesn’t work for you. – it increases your comfort zone in a wider range of temperatures, environments, and weather conditions. The first night I spent in a tent I couldn’t sleep. Now I have no issues because I trust the gear and the sounds don’t bother me.  I’m confident I’ll be safe, warm, and dry.  – you learn your personal limits and stress points – personal hygiene is a big deal for me and it took a few tries to be comfortable going without showering for a few days.  I learned alternatives to keeping clean.  – most importantly – the experience changes your perspective and you start to see hot showers and our “normal” indoor temperature range as luxuries rather than necessities.  During a real crisis, you will still worry about the outcome, but the conditions of the situation will be much less stressful and allow you to function and make better decisions. 

This is true!  We live 20 miles from the coast and always evacuate for serious hurricanes.  Riding them out is a miserable and frightening experience regardless of how well prepared you are.  In this case we prepared for the cold weather and possible ice, but had no expectation of how bad it would get.  It wasn’t until Tuesday that it became clear how extensive the power grid issues were and by then it was too late to leave.  My lesson – some disasters will catch you unexpectedly and you need to be prepared in advance to deal with them in case you can’t leave. I agree that the power companies information was worthless – they didn’t explain the source of outage or give any useful timelines.  Watching the outage numbers on tracking websites was the best source of information.  Our county hovered around 91-92% outage until Wednesday.  While they were refusing to commit to a timeline of restoring power on Wednesday, the outage steadily dropped to about 4% Thursday morning.

Thanks for the reply – I didn’t realize roof venting plays a part in managing moisture, I’ll have to look into that and your links.  Water and humidity are another big issue for the eastern half of the state where I’m at (the west is a desert).  I have to run a dehumidifier from fall to spring when the temperatures are nice and we don’t need to run the AC/heat much.  Our winter is normally mild and very wet.  I hope to build/buy another house in about 5-7 years so this is good info.  Unfortunately I learned from the first house that you pay a steep penalty for unconventional building practices (unless you find a contractor willing to let do it yourself).

Jesse, while I’m certainly not an expert in construction techniques, I can tell you practices in Texas are primarily focused on managing heat during the summer.  We invested heavily in energy efficiency when building our home.  My roof includes a radiant barrier to reflect as much energy as possible (which is obviously a negative in the winter). The roofs is vented to allow natural convection air circulation and prevent heat buildup from radiant heat.  Insulation is in the ceiling between the air conditioned house and the attic.  Ducting in the attic is insulated.  Water pipes, hot water heaters, and AC/heat in the attic are standard practice (my water pipes are in the ceiling insulation).  We also have double pane windows with low e glass (another radiant barrier).  It works – my electric bill in the summer is lower than the winter with electric heat.  And then this crazy winter weather happens… fortunately it worked well enough for us.  Without any heat, our house only got into the low 50’s while friends in older homes and apartments experienced indoor temps in the 30’s. 

The phrase “frost line” doesn’t exist in Texas common vocabulary.  Sewer lines don’t seem to be an issue in this current situation. I haven’t heard of anyone’s drain/sewer pipes freezing ever freezing in Texas.  I don’t think it applies in warm climates. 

Price gouging is illegal in Texas and all of the local media channels have been broadcasting where to report it.  It does occur but it’s rarer than the media fixates on… here is another story – a local gas station was closing for the evening and put all of their bottled water outside for anyone who needed it.  The next morning the owner found $600 stuffed under the door in payments for the water.

If you have never used a portable generator, you should know they are LOUD!  Most campgrounds have quiet hours and wont let you run them at night.  You wont want to sleep anywhere near it either.  So you definitely want a battery system you can recharge during the day. If this is the only load, just about any small gas powered generator should be able to charge it.  The 20 feet distance from the house is overly conservative in my opinion (it probably has all kinds of worst case assumptions built in) – I ran a generator on my back porch for 2 weeks after a hurricane.  Just make sure you don’t have any open windows near it, and don’t run it when you are not home (in case it somehow catches on fire).  DO NOT try to connect it to your house wiring unless you are very certain of you skills. You might also be able to charge the battery with your car in a pinch – but expect it to take a few hours.

Yes, I’ve had great luck with them for baking and making meals for camping/backpacking.  Hoosier Hill Farms egg and butter products make great pancake mixes – both of those smell great, no spackle.  I’ve also used cheese powders from a couple of places (Hoosier hill and nuts.com), and milk powder to make soups and sauces when camping.  If you are making a soup or sauce from dairy powders, add some fat like butter or ghee to get some of the richness back – it makes a big difference.  The cheese powder makes great popcorn seasoning also!  I also recommend freeze dried veggies from north bay trading co for making fast and easy soup.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.24.20075838v1 Here is one of the links shared here where they looked at this for a small group of COVID patients.  There was an earlier one which stated that there is older research showing vitamin D deficiency is a known risk factor for severe respiratory distress for other infections (sorry – cant find that one). I’m taking a multi-vitamin to cover the basics

I suspect this pandemic will do much of the work for you.  Those who suffered from the Great Depression (my grandparents) were frugal for the rest of their lives so I suspect this will have a similar effect.  Prepping will be less marginal and more mainstream.  I think it will be similar to suggesting friends buy insurance – they may not do it, but they wont think you are strange for suggesting it.

I think the biggest factor is going to be the number of women in your household.  Keep in mind we use it every time!  It’s also going to depend on the severity of their monthly menstural cycle which varies wildly and changes with age.  I promise I use more TP than my husband and son combined.  I think monitoring your own household use for a few weeks is the best course.