by K.U., Survival Blog:
We live in a rural county about 60 miles from Augusta, Georgia. The night of September 26th, 2024 was one we never thought we’d experience so far inland. A full-blown hurricane was upon us (winds were recorded at 80-100mph in our county).
We awoke early on the 27th to no power and 1 bar of very spotty cell service. We built our house on a hill and made sure that no trees were nearby, so our house had minimal damage. We had some water come in and down a wall from the chimney, but plan to fix that with a different kind of deflector that moves and protects water intrusion from wind.
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We were finally able to reach family by standing in the field to obtain a cell phone signal. Our daughter, her husband, their kids and our son all moved out to stay here. They were in Augusta and the devastation was apocalyptic. They had no power, no internet and no water. Around 50% of the homes had very large trees on them. Sadly, our rental house and our daughter’s rental house included. We are actively dealing with insurance claims and contractors so our renters can have a safe place to live.
The home our daughter’s family lives in was spared, in my opinion, due to divine intervention. Two months ago they had many large pine trees removed from around their home. They left some, but they were the strongest.
My mother’s house is about five miles from us and has substantial damage – multiple trees on the house and fences, straight-line winds are suspected because all the pines snapped in half. Divine intervention happened here too, the tree fell on the bedroom and she had fallen asleep in the family room. She is able to fully live on the other side of the house and the kitchen is fine, so in that regard, she is fortunate.
National media coverage of Augusta’s damage was non-existent. It was/is very, very bad. It will take a long time for people to recover and thousands are without a home to live in, rich and poor alike. Most people there were 100% unprepared for this event.
Augusta residents we personally know reported lots of non-resident foot traffic in the nicer neighborhoods and there were many instances of gas siphoning/stealing. A locked gas tank might have helped with that, they might look for a quicker victim. It sure didn’t take long for the scoundrels to surface.
Our family stayed with us for a full week until their water was restored. Our son had power when he left for home, but our daughter’s family went home to no power for 2 more days. As of today, Oct 11, they both STILL have no internet and only have 1 bar of bad cell service.
What we did well
We had water during the entire outage. We have a well, that lost power, but we’ve kept county water connected for $20 per month in case of power loss and fortunately, they had no issues with delivery to our area. However, one part of the county went without water. When we heard about it, we filled up the water bob immediately.
We have plenty of food stored and we went shopping a few days before the storm hit so we were well stocked. I cooked large batches of pasta and rice the day before the storm so we’d have food easy to grab.
We don’t have gas lines in our county so we built an all-electric house. Knowing that power is often temporarily lost in storms, we bought a cheap, basic range a few years ago that works off propane. This is what we cooked on – set up at the edge of the garage. We had 4 full propane tanks but during an entire week, only used about ½ of one. One day we would like an outdoor kitchen, with this range plus a wood range. It’s on the “to-do list”.
We filled up our 20 five-gallon gas cans before the storm and we also filled up all 4 of our vehicles in case we needed to evacuate or siphon gas for generators. It’s a good thing we did that because there was no local gas for over a week (no power). Gas lines a neighboring larger town, had lines 50+ cars deep with limits on purchases. We’d burn more gas than we gained going to get it.
We have 3 medium generators and one small one. One of the generators needed a new fuel line and wasn’t working, but the remainder were used daily. Thankfully we had pre-applied the “one is none rule”. One generator powered our 2 inside fridges, lights, and Internet. (Yes, it worked by plugging the generator into our router and the internet company’s modem under the house). The other ran our 3 garage deep freezers. We rotated and kept 2 on and 1 off every 4-5 hours. The small generator (mainly purchased to run power equipment for farm repairs too far away from the house) was only used when we felt we needed to give the larger generators a short break and some routine maintenance.
We also have two 2000-watt power boxes for inside the house. These ran the washing machine, the tv for entertainment, the router (which helped with cell phones), lights, etc. Laundry was dried on the clothesline.
Taking care of children was challenging, nothing can prepare you for this. There are 4 young children age 8 and under and they didn’t fully understand the gravity of what was happening. They are young, active, and required lots of attention/supervision.
