Make sure you’ve got shelf-stable food and water for everyone in the house, including pets. The rule of thumb is a gallon per person per day. Freeze water bottles if you want cold water.
Make sure you have enough meds!
Make sure you have batteries, candles, flashlights, and a manual can opener.
Make sure your electronics, including backup batteries, are charged. Unplug things you don’t want fried in case of a power surge.
Don’t tape your windows, it doesn’t help and you’ll just be stuck scrubbing goo off of them later.
Put a mug of frozen water in it in your freezer with a quarter on top of it. If your freezer defrosts, the ice will melt and the quarter will sink and tell you you need to throw things out.
Get everything that’s not nailed to a foundation out of your yard. That dead branch hanging on by a thread? Time to get it down (it was probably time to do that three days ago, but now’s better than never).
Park away from powerlines and trees if you can. Rain makes the ground soft and then trees fall over.
Have an evacuation plan to a shelter. Evacuate if they’re telling you to.
If you start to flood, don’t go in your attic. You’ll get trapped if the water rises too high and you can’t hack through your roof. This happened to a lot of people in Texas and Louisiana. Get ON the roof.
Is anyone else trapped in a tumblr au where they can’t see posts from anyone they follow? Only posts from tumblrs that @staff or whatever thinks I should follow? And it’s not even Halloween? HELP.
Someone tell that bear he’s not supposed to eat that with the skin on.
I live in South Africa. And if you live in South Africa and you have any contact with people from the US or Canada you might have run into a question about wildlife like lions and elephants roaming our streets. Most South Africans get pretty offended by questions like this. We are a civilized country, our large and dangerous wildlife gets contained in properly fenced parks.
I use to get offended by this until I visited a few places in Canada and realized that the reason why you ask is that some of your large and dangerous wildlife does simply roam the countryside and sometimes make excursions into town.
This honestly blew my mind. What do you mean, you have bears just walking around? What the hell?
north americans don’t all encounter deadly megafauna on our porches and front lawns but it happens often enough that we all think this is a reasonable amount of gigantic animal to happen to your house. so when we think of africa we kinda imagine it like this:
like. if we had elephants here. this is what we would be putting up with on the regular. what do you mean you guys are more sensible than us.
TELL ME AGAIN HOW AUSTRALIA IS THE DEATH COUNTRY We have two spiders and (apparently) 12 snakes but we don’t have lions, bears, wildcats, AND crocodiles. We sometimes have crocodiles and large boas in certain areas. We don’t have to worry about a bear attacking our halloween decor. Or moose deciding to joust on the front lawn.
Maybe similar to Africa, America’s fear of Australia is because you all assume our wildlife is exactly as huge and space-invadey.
oh yeah i forgot about the gators
I live halfway between two large cities in a pretty damn suburban area and hearing the sentence “did you hear there was a bear* spotted on [road that is pretty built up and I don’t think of as wild at all]” only left me a little surprised. My mother once saw what she described as a coyote going to school- just walking around a university campus.
so…. yes I was absolutely picturing elephants reaching over your back yard fences for some tasty leaves.
* Ursus americanus for clarification not homosexual sapiens
Couple years ago we had a bear in the market of downtown Ottawa. Ottawa has a population of 1 million, and it made it to the largest market (byward), and had to be removed with sedatives.
yeah, like. the US is big. a lot of it is much wilder than you think.
My high school in Colorado went into lockdown one day because there was a mother bear with two cubs wandering around the football field
I don’t think I have any pictures on my phone, but in Nevada where my parents live there are multiple bands of wild horses* that are just … around. Occasionally they decide a front yard is a great sleeping/ crapping place and that gets awkward for everyone involved.
Wild horses are not necessarily in the same category as bears and coyotes- I think they are technically feral domesticated horses. But they are Large and when there are 50 of them, it makes an impression.
When I worked at The Evil Empire (large software company, trust me, you’ve heard of it), we had a campus-wide email from Security alerting us to a cougar sighting.
Because we were mature adults, we spent the rest of the day making jokes about my work friend H’s mom.
Chicago famously has urban coyotes that have even been seen downtown. I’ve spotted them twice with my own eyes, crossing a four lane street in my neighborhood at dusk.
Yeah, we have them here, too, and those assholes never obey traffic laws.
I live right next to the 2nd most populous neighborhood (by capita) in the U.S., and I see a coyote at least every 2 months. If I lived near Golden Gate Park, I would see them every week.
Your neighborhood is so very much a city neighborhood that I am almost surprised that they hang out there!
Me too! And yet they’re here. Usually up at Coit Tower, but sometimes near the library (which is a very busy area). The crows usually harass them back into hiding, though.
Our previous house was in a very suburban area, and we regularly had coyotes not only wandering down the street, but going up onto neighbors’ porches.
Our new house is in a very suburban area, and there are deer that just stroll down the street. On the sidewalks, because apparently they’ve learned that’s safer.
Y'all, in my city we have coyotes who COMMUTE ON PUBLIC TRANSIT. And then get songs written about them.
It’s not even just the megafauna trying to kill you. Sorry for the crappy photo.
