Sometimes all hell does break loose, and it can do so literally right in your own front yard. That was my experience on August 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina came ashore and plowed through Mississippi, inflicting damage on a scale that’s difficult for most people to comprehend (including me, and I saw a lot of it up close).

I do not live on the coast where Katrina first made landfall, so I was spared the worst of the storm. I live 200 miles inland in a residential neighborhood. What’s more, I was on the west side - the “good side” - of the eye, so what we got wasn’t as bad as what other towns on the east side of the eye got.

The power went off about 2:00 in the afternoon that Monday. For the next six hours we were wound pretty tight - looking out the windows at the ancient oaks and giant pines swaying in the high winds, wondering if any of them were coming down, and whether they would come down on top of us, and on our 4-year-old.

Well into Monday evening, long after it was dark, the rains and wind were still kicking up, but we were finally able to relax. We lit candles and opened a bottle of wine, and grilled some great steaks that we removed from our deep-freezer. We would eat well over the next three or four meals, as we were forced either to consume the contents of our freezers, or lose them.

As we were preparing to go to bed, we turned on an electric lantern and a radio. Local and state news of any value was to be found on only one station - the state-sponsored public broadcasting channel. Their main anchor was an old friend of mine, so it was comforting to hear his voice, but the news he reported was anything but comforting.

He was reporting damage of apocalyptic proportions: Thousands of homes completely destroyed, hundreds of people dead or missing (plus thousands more in Louisiana), refugees overwhelming hotels all the way to Memphis.

We were resigned to a night without power, but we assumed it would be restored the next day.

It stayed off for the next eight days.

The temperature during that time was in the mid-to-high 90’s, and the humidity… I don’t even remember the number, but the biggest hurricane to hit the American mainland in a century had just passed through. As Matthew Broderick said in Biloxi Blues, it was Africa hot.

The photo on the left is what the street in front of our house looked like that morning. The street heading south was completely impassable, and it was days before it was cleared. By sheer good fortune the street to the north was clear; otherwise we would have been unable to drive anywhere - to the grocery store for food and water, to the emergency room had one of us been injured. For weeks afterward, huge piles of limbs and other debris lined most of the streets. We learned that only four blocks over, a woman had been killed when a tree fell through the roof of her house and into her second-floor room where she had gone to take shelter.

The winds that did this damage - remember, 200 miles inland - were impressive, to say the least. This is what they did to a pine tree just one block over. This scene was repeated dozens of times in our 100-square block neighborhood… hundreds of times across town.

In the coastal Mississippi town of Pass Christian, the winds were considerably more fierce, and the damage done by the storm surge only photos can do justice to:


The military presence was heavy. Armed soldiers manned checkpoints along roads to restrict traffic only to people with legitimate business in the areas of greatest destruction (I was doing relief work).

In case there was any doubt about how serious the military was about keeping order, they parked this little number where a house previously stood.

Ground Zero was a few miles to the west in Waveland, Mississippi, where Katrina scored a direct hit. As you exited I-10 and headed into (what used to be) Waveland, this was the scene that greeted you.

Almost every vehicle that ended up on its side or completely flipped had had its gas tank ripped loose and siphoned dry.

To put the scope of the destruction in some sort of perspective, these are only a handful of the hundreds of photos I took myself. I did not go to New Orleans, or even to all of the affected areas on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Catastrophic destruction extended in a 10-mile wide strip, 60 miles long, from New Orleans eastward to Ocean Springs in Mississippi. Homes and business by the thousands were destroyed well into the interior of Mississippi, and we all saw what happened to New Orleans.

The lessons from the Mississippi Coast and New Orleans are obvious: When a major hurricane is headed your way, GET OUT. Do not try and do the calculus on whether or not it’s an acceptable risk to stay and try to ride it out - it isn’t. A few hundred dollars spent on gas, a hotel room and a few restaurant meals - even if your home avoids any serious damage - is well worth it to avoid ending up trapped in a place where afterwards it looks like the photos here.

That lesson is clear enough. What may be less clear is what disasters like this mean for people in that ring of affected areas outside the bullseye of total destruction. While a hurricane often gives residents in its path several days to prepare to leave, sometimes they don’t. Hurricane paths aren’t entirely predictable, and many have made last-minute turns to come ashore where forecasters aren’t predicting, giving residents 24 hours or less to prepare. So if you live within about 50 miles of the Gulf of Mexico, orthe Atlantic Ocean south of Washington, D.C., you’d be well-advised to spend some time preparing the supplies and logistics to enable you to evacuate on short notice.

I wrote above that power was out in my neighborhood for eight days. While I was among the last to get power restored, large parts of my city were without power for three, four, five days straight. That may not sound serious in the context of the greater suffering happening to the south, but that would be a simplistic characterization. Consider:

  • Without power, gas stations can’t pump gas. Underground their tanks may be full, but without electricity to run the pumps, underground is where that gas stays.
  • With perhaps only 5% of gas stations equipped with generator power to run the pumps, what few stations are open are swamped by customers. For the first 24 hours in my area, virtually no stations were open. There was simply no gas to be had unless you had stored some beforehand. As other stations became operational, half-mile long lines that took an hour or more to get through, were common.
  • Without power, none of the grocery stores could accept credit or debit cards, since the networks that authorize those payments are run on grid power. While I found one store that graciously accepted checks from people - without being able to verify that there were funds in their accounts (Kroger, for anyone keeping score) - most of them accepted cash only.
  • Without power, though, ATM’s didn’t work. My rough estimate of the percentage that did, based on my driving around and looking for one that did, is that perhaps 5-10% of them were working after the first two days. If you could find one that was working, chances were about 50-50 that it had run out of cash. For most people, the only cash they had for the first 60 hours or so was what they had in their pockets or under their mattresses.
  • Without power, grocery stores have to discard tons of frozen foods and fresh meat. Any fresh produce that requires refrigeration has to be thrown out. With no freezers or refrigerators, they can’t re-stock those items either. The result is that people swarm the canned food aisles, stripping them virtually bare. If you don’t like beets and creamed corn, you may be out of luck. All of a sudden, if you haven’t stored your own food supply, scarcity starts to loom in the back of your mind as a real possibility.
  • Without power, street lights don’t work. Every intersection that’s busy enough to have warranted a street light, now has to be navigated as though it were a four-way stop, and there simply aren’t enough police officers to direct traffic at all of them. And, you’d be surprised at how poorly drivers behave when they encounter an intersection like that. Navigating real four-way stops was no problem for them, but many seemed completely incapable of figuring out the mental transition from street-lights to four-way stops. Collisions and road rage incidents increased significantly.
  • Without power, and thus without refrigeration, people get rattled - and sometimes snap - by having to do without basic luxuries they’ve previously taken for granted. Just 40 miles to the south of me, on the second day following Katrina, a man shot and killed his own sister during a fight they had in a convenience store parking lot, over one of the last bags of $1.39 ice.

That’s just a short list of the kinds of things that happen when “the grid” goes down for just a few days. When you think about it, most people have never had to go without electricity for more than a few hours. A few have had to go without power overnight, but it’s a very rare occurrence. Only a very tiny percentage of people have ever experienced involuntary deprivation of electrical power for a week or more, and only a tiny percentage of those are prepared to deal with it, to the point that it’s only an inconvenience and doesn’t border on crisis.

Civil order, to put it simply, begins to break down after about three days of widespread power outages and the resulting shortages in gasoline, groceries, and cash. In a situation like Katrina, the strain put on dwindling resources by the native population is bad enough, but on top of that you have to add tens of thousands of refugees, all of them looking for food, gasoline, and cash too. And all of them in a nasty mood because they’re living out of suitcases in whatever hotel they could find; entire families in the same room for days at a time; and wondering what has become of their homes and the belongings they were unable to bring with them. When a large percentage of those refugees are from the underclass of a city like New Orleans, you can see how “people” problems can start multiplying very quickly.

So the lessons I learned from Katrina, in a nutshell, were:

  • Store enough water and food for a minimum of two weeks of your family’s eating and hygiene needs. A month is better, and if you decide to store that much it’s likely you’ll want to extend that supply to three months or more.
  • Store enough gasoline to completely fill up your car’s tank. Cheap 5-gallon gas cans can be bought for under $10 each. Better ones can be had for $10-$20. With gas prices in the $2.50 range, and most cars holding 15-20 gallons, you can do this for a total investment of about $90. Most cars and SUV’s have a full-tank range of between 350 and 400 miles. That’s enough to take you from New Orleans to Memphis, or from Houston to Dallas, from Charleston to Atlanta, or from Chicago to St. Louis. It’s money well-spent if you have to bug out, no gas stations in your area are pumping gas, you have your children with you, and the situation outside the car looks like it might be getting ugly.
  • Buy a generator. There are great little units in the 4,000-watt range for as little as $300 new, but you can get by with smaller and less expensive ones if all you want to do is power your refrigerator and freezer for a few hours a day, and run a fan and a couple of lamps. Be aware that a small generator may consume 5 gallons of gas a day even on moderate usage (meaning running it a few hours here and a few hours there), so you may want to increase your gasoline storage accordingly.
  • Arm yourself appropriately. A deer rifle or a baseball bat just aren’t reliable self-defense weapons in most crisis situations where your life may be in danger. You need to think handgun when you’re mobile and short-barreled shotgun when you’re at home, and you need to train in their use. If you have a range in your area, they will often offer this service, or be able to put you in touch with NRA-certified instructors.
  • Have a plan. Two plans, actually: One for bugging out, and one for bugging in. When it comes to hurricanes, floods, and fire, just GET OUT. But in other situations - civil unrest, for example, or any crisis in which there is not an impending physical event headed your way - give some thought to the conditions under which you’re willing to stick it out at your home, and those under which you’d be better off going to another location. My family and I currently have two options within a 5-mile range, one option at a 20-mile range, three options at a 100-mile range, and one option at a 400-mile range.
  • Start assembling a “BOB,“ or “bug out bag.“ Ours isn’t even a bag - it’s a big heavy-duty plastic tub with a tight-fitting lid, in which we have enough food to feed us all for a week; toiletry items; basic medicine and first aid supplies (ibuprofen, antacids, bandages, anti-histamines, antibiotic/disinfectants, etc.); and just a tad more ammunition than we think we’d need in a bad scenario. If we have to leave the house, we can load that tub into the SUV, along with a couple of cases of water, and be out of the house in under 10 minutes (longer if we spend time attending to pets, valuables, etc.). We could live out of the SUV for a week if we had to. We could certainly make it a few hundred miles to friends’ or family’s houses, with an unscheduled, overnight stopover along the way if we had to. If you have small children, put a stuffed animal or two, a couple of games and books, and some candy (or whatever food items your child considers a treat) in your BOB.
  • Buy a tent large enough for your family to be comfortable in. If you don’t store it in your vehicle, store it with your BOB. Be sure and go camping in it at least once, so you can get an idea of how it’s set up, and whether it’s big enough and rugged enough for you. We have one of the tents with a large sleeve that can be zipped closed for normal setup, or opened up to fit tight around the back of an SUV. They can be bought for about $200. If we had to evacuate our house, we would have a range of between 350 and 700 miles (depending on how full our tank was at the time, and if we take our gas cans), we would have food and water for a week, a large comfortable tent, and we would be sufficiently armed against those who might do us harm.
  • Get maps. With your home at the center, draw a circle on a map with a 750-mile radius. Purchase road maps of all the states the circle encompasses or crosses, and put them in your glove compartment or BOB. AAA is a good resource for these, and I recommend joining them. Maps and roadside assistance are worth the price, but if you do any traveling at all, their discounts on airfare, hotels and rental cars more than make up for the annual fee.

As exhaustive as this may sound if you’re just now starting to give some thought to suburban preparedness, it really only hits the high points. There is a lot more you may want to consider, but if your emergency preparations are essentially zero right now, what’s listed above will go a long way toward helping you and your family be fed, hydrated, mobile, relatively comfortable, and safe in the event you have to leave your home on very short notice.