Howdy Freeholders!

Today I’m writing about the prepper mindset and how people perceive—or their lack of perception—situations that are or could in fact be quite dangerous. In a previous post about being prepared and the prepper mindset I briefly mentioned having an experience or two to share with you. When I lived in Florida and worked at a big-box “sheets and shit” store, a hurricane was making a beeline for our city and what I saw customers doing leading up to the last few hours before the storm blew my mind (as a recent Yankee transplant).

Then, a few years later, while working at a big-box art supply store, I encountered a few situations in which things could have gone much worse than they did, but customers reacted as if there wasn’t a care in the world. Again, my mind was blown, and I kept track of all these little tidbits so that I’d have experiences that I could draw on to make sure I don’t make the same mistakes they did. As a bonus, I’d have details for characters in my books to make them more realistic.

Hurricane warning

The big storm was headed for us and we knew almost a week and a half in advance that it was coming. All the prediction centers were showing tracks that would hit Florida, and as time went on, and the predictions grew more confident, the path of the hurricane was narrowed closer and closer to our location.

A few days before impact, the hurricane watches and warnings were posted to give everyone time to make their evacuations if needed. By that point, this thing was barreling right toward us. We were fairly confident that it was going to hit our area.

My wife and I were recent transplants from Delaware, which in the 20 some years I lived there, only had two hurricanes—actually tropical storms.

We were expecting hurricane force winds of 75 miles an hour and above, and as first-time homeowners, my priority was to make sure that my house was secured. I didn’t have to worry about the roof—since Hurricane Andrew caused such widespread destruction in southern Florida in 1992, new homes in Florida are required to have roofs able to withstand 120 mile an hour winds. Our house, little as it was, had been built in the lat 1990s so we were good with the roof.

But I was concerned about the windows and the garage door. I planned ahead of time and had pieces of plywood cut to cover our windows to protect the glass from flying debris. It was to be our first hurricane, and I wanted to make sure it wasn’t our last.

My boss had similar thoughts. We had big sheets of plywood on hand to cover the front glass wall/doors, and the only other area we had to worry about was the big loading dock at the back of the store, but it had a heavy duty rolling metal door that was easily secured from the inside. The weak point for the store was definitely the wall of glass at the front.

Eventually, the plywood went up, piece by piece. The day before landfall, as I stood outside on the ladder watching the clouds build and the wind pick up, all I could think about was getting home to secure my own house. Because of company policies, I had drawn the short end short straw and had spent the bulk of my time in the last three days before the storm hit at the store making sure it was ready. We were shorthanded, and what few people we did have decided to call in sick leaving me in a handful of others to pick up the slack and make sure the store wasn’t damaged.

What I also won’t forget were the people coming in to buy towels, bedsheets, pots and pans, and every other seemingly useless gadget right before landfall. We had specially created bins of emergency candles, flashlights, batteries, and random supplies that would be useful in a power outage—we basically sold home furnishings, we weren’t a hardware store, after all—but these items were largely untouched.

I like to chalk that up to the fact the customers were mostly prepared for storms and the need to buy that stuff, so they came in to buy luxury items. But looking at the way they were dressed—flip-flops, T-shirts, sundresses etc.—I don’t think they were even aware a storm was on the way. I’m not sure how they could do that with all the big plywood sheets covering windows and doors, but maybe it happened often enough in Florida that people just didn’t take much notice of it.

At any rate, we had tons of people shopping in the store that day—far fewer than normal, I’ll admit—but far more than I’d ever expected mere hours before landfall of a major hurricane. Store policy at the time was we couldn’t close the store until the last customers were gone. Management wanted to eek out every last penny from them buying random knickknacks and cookware. The entire time I paced back and forth, grinding my teeth, glancing at my watch and watching time slip away. Valuable time that I could’ve been spent making last-minute preparations at my own house. If nothing else, as a meteorology junkie, I was missing The Weather Channel updates and watching Jim Cantore on the beach before all hell broke loose.

I don’t know the fate of those customers when the storm hit—it veered north of us at the last second, sparing Bradenton from the majority of the damage that we were predicted to endure. Maybe that’s what they were expecting—I was certainly told often enough that the West Coast of Florida was rarely hit with storms. But I know I learned several lessons from the experience.

Takeaways

1. When they say you have a few days to prepare, start prepping NOW. I’m not talking about getting supplies stored up like candles, canned food, that sort of thing—all that stuff should’ve already been done. And in fact, I had plenty of food, candles, batteries, and flashlights and such squirreled away at the house well before hurricane season even started. But I would’ve liked the opportunity to have had time to get the store and get maybe an extra case of water, or an extra couple bags of chips—nothing that was absolutely necessary, but it could have made the difference between surviving the event, and being a little more comfortable during the event.
2. When it comes to John Q. Public, never underestimate how stupid or completely ignorant people can be concerning major events affecting entire regions. No matter where you’re at, no matter what happens, there’s always going to be a certain segment of the population that’s just completely clueless, and therefore helpless when the excrement hits the oscillating device. These are the people I learned to spot and watch out for. I can see them coming a mile away, now. They pulled into our parking lot mere hours before landfall. That right there is my first clue. No one goes to a sheets and bedding store before a hurricane.

Why?

Because those places don’t carry supplies that you might need in the aftermath of the storm. Other than the aforementioned handful of batteries, flashlights, and candles we’d prepped in the aisles for customers to grab—all of which you can find, including a whole lot more, at hardware stores and Walmart. Shoot, most of the stuff we sold that was actually useful during a storm was also available in gas stations at the time.

3. Don’t put your personal safety in the hands of someone else. My personal preparations were impacted dramatically because I was essentially at the beck and call of my corporate masters. Next time, I told myself, I might call in sick, too.[1] At the end of the day, a job as a job, but my house and all of our possessions were far more important to me than making sure the store was open for a few handful of idiots that couldn’t be bothered to heed the advice to hunker down.
4. I also learned to make sure that I had a spare gas can on hand, not only for the lawnmower, but for our car. In the day or so before the storm hit, I witnessed lines at gas stations like I’d never seen before. Cars lined up around blocks and down streets from every gas station I drove past. But this only happened in the last day or so before the storm hit. For the previous week, when everyone knew it was coming and the news constantly talked about it, people seemed to ignore gas stations. Then suddenly, the day before the storm hit, everyone had to go get gas at same time (and probably milk and bread).

This is one area where I was pretty satisfied with my preps. Not only were my wife and I driving cars with fully loaded gas tanks several days earlier, but I had filled up the tank of our modest lawnmower, and a couple spare cans for the lawnmower. All said and done, I had approximately 10 gallons of gas sitting in the shed in the backyard if we needed to run the cars to charge phones, etc.

Which leads me to the things that I wish I had.

First of which is a generator. We’ve never had one, but living in certain areas of the country that are prone to tornadoes (Texas and Illinois), hurricanes (Florida), and blizzards/power outages in the winter (Illinois), the importance of having a generator has been drilled into my head over the past few decades. My wife’s parents went so far as to buy a whole house generator and several people in my neighborhood have one as well. It’s definitely in my long-term planning.

This post is getting a little long in the tooth, however so I think I’ll wrap up here, and continue with another observational post next time when I regaled you the tale of the great arts and crafts power outage in Keller, Texas. Tune in next time for more adventures in retail.

Until then, as always, keep your head down and your powder dry my friends…we live in interesting times.

---

NOTES

[1]: There was a next time…three of them, actually…all that same season of 2004…but I never called out.