We rode Katrina out at home, and then stayed for a week before going to Houston for 2 more weeks.
A couple of lessons learned from Katrina...
1)Take pictures/video of everything, indoors and outside.
It turned out that we didn't need this for insurance purposes, but trees were gone after and it was nice to have "before" pictures.
My boss had 6ft of water in her house for 2 weeks. Everything they could salvaged afterwards fit in the trunk of a car.
Some people's houses just weren't there anymore...only the front steps remained.
2)Have at least one corded phone, and use "Ma Bell".
Cordless phones require electricity, and cels become pretty useless due to damaged towers. My neighbor had corded, but used the local cable company for her service...which she lost the day before the storm hit. We had the only working phone in the neighborhood the entire time.
3)Have a good old fashion paper address book with everyones phone number and address in it.
I had a "state of the art" electronic contact server where all our computers could share (read and write) to a huge contact list of phone numbers, addresses, etc. It was great....until there was no electricity. Your cels contact list also become useless when you can no longer charge the phone.
4)Have portable backups of priceless computer items (digital pictures, video tapes, etc). Online backups are great for most people, but are way to small and slow for large backups. They should also never be your ONLY means of backup. (Computer backups are an entire separate subject so I won't go into too much detail here.)
I never had a need for a laptop prior to Katrina, but we now have two.
5) Don't worry about anything that can be replaced. It's all just stuff. Protect precious pictures, collectibles, family treasures, etc.
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