What are you doing to get ready for today’s storm?

What are you doing to get ready for today’s storm? We see it in my county every time. The schools send kids home early, or cancel for the day. People come out of th woodwork complaining about this. But should they?

If you have created a good plan for being ready for life’s most likely events, (Tornadoes in Tennessee , for example), do you not want your family at the place where you are MOST ready?

Many of you do not know that March 2020 was a big month for our community not because of the now infamous “two weeks to flatten the curve,” but because a massive tornado touched down and stayed down. It tore out communications, it tossed houses and people all over the place. We lost friends and neighbors.

In the Holler, where I live, all we knew that morning was that there was no power and no communications. While Tactical and Knighthawk set up the generators, I started driving toward town to find out what happened. In the parking lot at Walmart, still in my PJs, I learned of the tragedy and regional communications outage.

I decided to focus on the hyper local in that moment, went home, and we focused on helping neighbors keep their fridges and freezers cold, on making sure everything was stable here. We got our news about the event from a local FM radio station.

Knighthawk went into town to help with cleanup and rescue.

Later that day, cell phones allowed for text messages to be sent and I got a message out to Mama Sauce to let everyone know we were OK. It is a good thing she did because they were organizing in West Tennessee to send someone out to make sure we were ok.

I had always known that community was important, but this event really brought things home for me.

That is why we focus so much on connecting people at SRF. That is why I am so mission driven to make this gathering a success. Not just to make sure we all learn from each other, but to help foster stronger and stronger relationships.

This coming Saturday, we kick off at 9am with a discussion on Underground Networking and it all builds from there. I plan to be there despite these pesky storms ripping across the country.

But in answer to my first question – what are you doing to get ready for these storms? I am please to be in a much more stable place than 2020. We have topped off our solar storage from the grid so that I have running water should we lose power. The freezers are consolidated and full so we do not have to cool dead air or move things all over the holler to reduce what must be managed. We have a rudimentary communications plan in place (which I aim to make better after watching Evan’s session at SRF this coming weekend).

We have connected with so many people all over our county and country that we are as ready as we can be.

Are you?