Thread: Lessons learned from Savannah tornado.

Tomorrow will be two weeks to the day since a small tornado blew through my neighborhood. I've been meaning to write an AAR, but everyday events have conspired against me. I will be writing this in parts so check back for updates.

The storm blew through on a Thursday afternoon about 2:30-3:00 pm with lots of rain high winds and hail. I was at work and we lost power for about an hour. I finally managed to get home at about 5:00pm and my neighborhood looked like a war zone. There were multiple trees down on houses and limbs and trees across roads. Many of the damaged trees were snapped about half way up and the debris was scattered.

By the grace of god, my house was spared serious damage, even though both of my next door neighbors had trees down and significant damage. We had some big limbs down in the front yard and of course the power was out (we
had hard-line phone capability the entire time) but otherwise nothing too bad.

I packed my wife and 2 year old son off to a hotel for the night and surprisingly she was able to find one several miles from the house that hadn't jacked up their rates. We were surprised at how localized the damage was and people outside the path of the tornado were scarcely touched. I decided to stay at the house that night and keep an eye on everything.

Lessons Learned:

Dry Ice- When I was living in Missouri, I found out that you could throw a few blocks of dry ice in your freezer during a power outage and it would keep everything frozen solid for up to 4 days. I had called home and found out the power was out so I picked up some dry ice on the way home and chucked it in the freezer. Worked like a charm, but don't use it in the refrigerator. It will freeze everything solid.

Flashlights- Have plenty of them and accessible batteries.

• Headlamp- Works great for general, hands free, duties around the house. An LED version on low can get up to 160hrs or more from one set of batteries.
  
• Tactical lights- I had tactical lights and weapons lights on me, but didn't use them for many tasks because they are way too bright and burn through batteries quickly. I have decided to keep some simple and reliable handheld lights for the wife and kids to use and reserve the tactical lights for me.
  
• Batteries- I keep all my batteries in a common storage box and inventory it every few months. I had discovered the week before that my D batteries had leaked, so I had a new set when the storm hit. It makes more sense to me to store them all together (surefire, C, D, AA, AAA) and have them handy than to run all over the house looking for a specific set of batteries.
  
• Weapon light- I had a surefire M3 combatlight mounted on my carbine and a Glock light on my G19. I took my TLR-1 off my other carbine and used it as my primary handheld light. Never forget to have a handheld in addition to your weapons lights because in many/most situations you want to have the ability to be able to illuminate something without pointing a weapon at it.
  
• Chemlights- Worked great for general illumination. Most of mine are Caylume brand and the expiration dates were in the early 1990's. Most of them still work fine and I only had a couple fail. I posted one outside each entrance to my house so neighbors/police could tell I was home and warn others that the house was occupied. FYI, Wal0mart chemlites are made in China and may have signifigantly decreased shelf lives. FWIW, I would shop around and try to find American made ones.
  
  
  

More to come...

Thanks for the advise!! We had one hit about 2 miles north of my house a few years back........completely LEVELED a few houses.