Preparing for the WORST | Hurricane Florence

You coming? Jonah and I are going on errands today. Today we are prepping for Hurricane Florence, which is going to be hitting the South Carolina or North Carolina coast depending on where it actually hits. They don't know. We are here and gonna get our stuff. We are in an impact area. There's gonna be, you know, rain and possible winds here. They haven't— obviously they don't know what's gonna happen with it, but we're preparing for all of these things and making sure that what needs to get done on our farm is done. Release the hounds!

No, no! We're going to, uh, clip their wings.

I have seen estimates of rain from a foot to 5 feet.

This definitely needs water.

If it rained 5 feet I can't even imagine that, honestly.

It's like, in a 5-foot rain event, Lord knows what would happen. But these guys are right by the creek. It's never flooded to where they are that I know of, but in that event, we could move— easily move them up here or even right here. And then it floods to our house, we got bigger problems.

I mean, I feel like we're just gonna have a lot of damage, a lot of flooding. Um, I feel like our creek is gonna flood into the pasture. Um, we're gonna lose topsoil, which is sad.

That's something we need to do. I want to put down more hay mulch on the garden. As the rains actually get closer, they've pushed them back to like Monday instead of the weekend. I'm gonna put hay over the muddy areas. And the animals. Gonna protect our soil from getting washed away.

I'm going to buy like tie-down straps for the chick shaws and the meat shaw if we feel like the wind is gonna— if as it gets closer and it looks like the wind's gonna be real intense. We finally decided that this was the ratchet system for us after looking at all of the systems. Now I have to go find stakes. Our plan is to mount these to the chick shop, and then we will— and these will go to a stake. I'm gonna pick up some tarps for just-in-case issues, you know.

Um, mainly it's calling for rain, but there's also a possibility of high winds. I know these coops have been just fine in 50-mile-an-hour winds, but anything maybe over that, I would probably want to maybe tie them down.

We ordered drop cords for the— for specific for our generator, so so that we can, if we lose power, we can do that.

Let's test, let's test the fuel level on the generator.

Right here.

We are nearly full.

We're getting gasoline. We were gonna get gas except this gas station doesn't have gas.

Ah!

So I don't know what's going on, but like, as you can see, there's tape on all of them, but there's a guy there. I don't know if he's filling up or what, but I'm just gonna try to hit any gas station I can then, I guess at this point. Oh shoot, out of stock. This one have it? I finally found a gas station that was not out. So out of, out of 2, I say this is my third, this is my third gas station. Um, our propane is already filled up so we don't need to worry about that. We're, um, Gonna check the bus for diesel.

Aww, where are you guys going?

We're gonna go feed the sea monsters.

Okay, you know what? I'm gonna check the fuel situation.

Okay.

Because we're selling out of fuel is what you're telling me.

Yeah, there is.

Yeah, the keys are not in it. That's right. It says a half a tank, but keys aren't on, so I'm not sure if that's accurate. Got the bus started. Ah, it's true. Right at a half a tank, maybe a hair under. That will last a long time. That's 40 gallons and generator. That's 80 hours.

That's a possibility that we could use the bus if needed. We're headed home and I'm sure that Justin and Jonah and the rest of us will be working on it. I'm gonna check the weather when we get home and see what they're saying. There was a lot of different things coming out this morning beforehand, so that's why we're preparing for the worst.

Lydia is back. We gotta get ready for the storm. I mean, 1 to 5 feet of rain, that's kind of crazy. Well, this is one thing. What's this have to do with getting ready for a storm? These are hooks. We need to get our electric nets out of the field. The ones for the sheep. We still not got them up. Well, partly because we don't have a real nice place to put them. How are we going to be organized? I had a paper with my list. Did my paper get taken away? Jonah, Jonah, we're not doing anything without that paper, bro. Do we have fencing out at the cows? You already have posts made?

No, but we can build posts and a fencing saw.

Do you have empty rebar? Rebar? This is a problem right here. I can't ever seem to fix that just with caulk. So Beauty got us a repair kit. Water runs into our area here, floods our barn a little bit. But even worse, there's not an end piece on that gutter up there, so water gushes out right here in a hard rain event and really starts flushing water into here. We got our posts. Let's go. This is where the cows have been. Gonna take them right next door.

Got me a shade, a mobile person shade.

Come on, stud! Best part of a grazer's day, right for those red flowers. We're gonna mow that today. We could wait a couple days, but if it's gonna rain, we want to get all the mowing we can get done before that happens. Got fuel, 5 gallons. 5 gallons. So we get more and more invested and back into this farm, more and more things are falling into place. If you notice that things have places, we know where things are. Right here is where we need to put our tarp, mainly because that's our porch, and sometimes we have blowing rain, and rain and dust falls through. The gas tanks are good. We got 2 2 full gas tanks and half of— half a tank of diesel. Okay, so we've got 40 gallons of diesel and 10 gallons of gas.

Yeah.

How are the sea monsters?

Good. They needed it. They needed a drink.

Mom, you know what Pat Foreman says?

Yep. If you're not gonna drink out of it, then your chickens shouldn't drink out of it.

What, you gonna drive us?

Yeah.

I say, hey, while we got my dad's tractor why not get all this sheep fencing up? What are you gonna ride on my lap?

Where am I gonna ride?

There it is, got the bucket loaded. Nothing like a storm to push us into best management practices and get the sheep fence up, huh, Beck? Well, probably about halfway done. More stuff to do tomorrow to prepare for this rain. But some of you guys are asking, well, how are some of the folks doing from the tour? Well, Ken Randall from the Island Homesteader—

hey everybody, Justin asked me to make a quick video to show how we prepare for a hurricane here on Hatteras Island.

Here's his report on what he's doing.

So let me show you some of the things that we've done. That's one of the preparations for an oncoming storm, is sending the family out. Sometimes we board up our windows. A lot of what we do just involves just picking up. Most of the damage over the years that we've had has been from floodwaters. It's all tidewater. So we just pick everything up, get everything up off the ground, off of the floor as much as we can. I've stood in this garage during Hurricane Emily and there was 37 inches of water. In this garage, you can still see a water line right in here. And then not too long ago, last year I think, Hurricane Matthew, you can see the water line right here that we had in this garage. 2 years ago, not last year, 2 years ago. We drive our riding lawn mowers up on decks to get them up above. Floodwaters. We make sure our gas tanks in our cars are full, and we try to keep them as full as possible right up until the weather hits. We make sure we have plenty of drinking water on hand. Charcoal grills are brought in the house. These are some blueberries, so they came in to get out of the wind. Lawnmower is up on the back deck and strapped down with the weird roll over top of it to keep the rain off of it. And trash can is all secure. Another thing I do to prepare is to have several— well, not several, 2 or 3 anyway— weather sources that I consult, people I trust, people ahead of time of the storm I've watched their stuff, listened to their stuff, and trust their stuff. There's one guy on Facebook, Weather Underground, the SpaghettiModels.com, Mike's Weather Page, and of course always the National Hurricane Center. And that's about it. That I get for information. I do not ever turn the Weather Channel on, and I avoid as much of the other media hype as I can, and I try to avoid as much of the hype and drama on Facebook as I can. These are the only sources I want to use to make my decisions and my choices with, and not somebody else's rant or somebody else's opinion. As far as my bees go, I posted a video on my YouTube page a day or so ago— yesterday, I guess— as to what I did to get them ready for the hurricane. So if you want to, you can go over and check out my YouTube page at Island Homesteader. And last but certainly not least, one of the things I do to prepare for a hurricane is spend some time in prayer. I found that it's made a huge difference when I'm facing down a storm and trying to make decisions. So that's my preps for a hurricane. Every hurricane is a little different. Sometimes we do more, sometimes we do less.

It seems like the folks in this community are well prepared. We're going to continue to prepare tomorrow. I hope all fares well for everybody.