#HurricanePrep Another year has gone by since my last safety post. That time went by so fast.
June is here again and it means the start of Hurricane season here in Florida.
Last years’ post has a good list of safety items you should have in case of emergency.
This month I’ll check all those supplies and make sure they are working.
Even though I live in an apartment that has their own maintenance, I still like to do my own safety checks just to be sure.
I’ll test the smoke detectors (wearing earplugs of course) and checking that the fire extinguisher is charged.
Also will check that my emergency hurricane supplies are working and functional and stockpile a few new cans of food.
Another good disaster preparedness step is to secure important documents in a safe place and make copies of them and save those in a secure cloud service just in case.
Make sure you have the correct insurance coverage also in case of a hurricane or flood.
This year in Florida, our Governor has declared a nine-day tax free period for hurricane supplies beginning May 31.
The items that will be tax free include:
Reusable ice packs up to $10
Flashlights, lanterns and candles up to $20
Gas or diesel fuel containers up to $25
Batteries, coolers, and first-aid kits up to $30
Radios and tarps up to $50
Generators up to $750
If you need to get hurricane supplies, the tax break this weekend should make it a little more affordable.
Safety first!
Is it a good thing if the smoke alarms go off by themselves, for no reason, sometimes in the middle of the night? 🙂
Along with backups of important documents, don’t forget your DATA! Always keep your irreplaceable data – photos, accidental works of genius – in at least three spots: on your local computer’s drive, a secondary storage means to help prevent downtime (e.g. version control, RAID 1 or 5, or NAS), and something offsite (e.g. backup service, cloud storage, website).
Onsite backups are nice, but you are super screwed if a fire or flood takes out your home and everything inside it – unless you have that offsite backup. Offsite backups alone can seem secure until their online service goes offline or bankrupt, and then all those precious digital things disappear, like dust in the wind.